Hazel Blears: My hon. Friend has an excellent record on highlighting such issues in the House. I can give him a couple of examples of local authorities doing exactly the kind of the thing that he has outlines. Kirklees has a warm zone plus scheme, whereby loft and cavity wall insulation is being installed for free, on a systematic house-by-house basis. People get a personal visit and it is hoped to put cavity wall insulation into 40,000 homes. Leicester has a hot lofts scheme, in partnership with British Gas and Mark Insulations. An area is selected using thermal imaging to see where the most energy is escaping, and the homes are then targeted. The provision is free, irrespective of income.

Clive Betts: First, may I congratulate my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench for holding their nerve on the issue when Opposition Members, their friends with vested interests, RICS and the like were losing theirs? When the Minister monitors the impact of home information packs, will he report back to the House specifically on packs in which home condition reports were included, so that we can see whether they have an even more beneficial effect, and whether they ensure an even higher completion rate of sales in cases where offers have been made, as many of us believe they will?

Rob Marris: The Thames Gateway is an exciting project. What steps are being taken to proof the project against climate change, in particular with respect to rising sea levels that might flood the project, to make sure that we do not have a major development in the Thames Gateway that, in the next few decades, is overtaken by the changes to the climate that are already taking place?

Yvette Cooper: Sadly, the reason why the views of the regional assembly and regional development agency are disputed in the south-east, certainly by Conservative councils there, is that they want to cut the level of house building in the region. That is a tragic thing for local councils in the south-east to want to do, given the overwhelming need for more housing throughout the region and the number of first-time buyers who are desperately in need of more support.

Sharon Hodgson: As the Minister is aware, a few years ago Sunderland city council transferred its housing stock to Gentoo Sunderland, formerly Sunderland Housing Group. Gentoo is in the process of renovating and renewing that housing stock. Would she be willing to accept my invitation to visit Sunderland and discuss how the Government's commitment to building 3 million new homes will dovetail into the work already being done in Sunderland?

Hazel Blears: Yes, I think it is essential that people have trust in the integrity and transparency of all our systems in government, and I certainly undertake to look at the issue and to try to ensure, as far as we possibly can, complete transparency around applications. It is important that people know exactly what has taken place.

Eric Pickles: In the interests of that transparency, can the Secretary of State explain why Government objections to the building of a business park on the established green belt of County Durham was suddenly and unexpectedly withdrawn? What steps were taken to ensure that the persons withdrawing the Government objections knew that the directors of the developers, Durham Green Developments—a Mr. Ruddick and a Mrs. Kidd, both employees of Mr. Abrahams—made a substantial donation to the Labour party? In view of the controversy surrounding the business park, will she release all Government papers relating to the development?

Paul Holmes: The details of the local government settlement are to be announced shortly, but all those involved in local government already say that they face dire financial circumstances because the Government have consistently underfunded the increased costs of recycling, an ageing population and concessionary fares. What reassurance can the Secretary of State offer local authorities of all political complexions, including Labour-run Sheffield city council, Derbyshire county council and North East Derbyshire district council, all of which have confirmed that they face cuts in the next two or three years?
	The Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Hazel Blears): I can tell the hon. Gentleman that over the past 10 years there has been a 39 per cent. real-terms increase in local government finance, and that over the next three years there will continue to be real-terms increases for local government. In the first year, there will be an extra £960 million. I remember the days when, as a local councillor, I spent 10 years cutting budgets in real terms. That happened every single year. It is a very different scenario nowadays. He mentioned concessionary fares. There is £212 million for concessionary fares, which should meet all the costs of local authorities.

Nicholas Winterton: Further to that point of order, Mr. Speaker. I am interested in this House and the use of topical debates. Is it not important that the House has a meaningful involvement in the decision on what topical debate should take place? To leave this just to exchanges across the House is not good enough. Why will the Leader of the House not consult the shadow Leader of the House and minority parties on what truly constitutes a topical debate?

Yvette Cooper: The Bill allows councils to offer council tenancies. We need that change in the legislation, otherwise councils might not have been able to offer council tenancies for the homes that they have built. We believe secure tenancies to be extremely important, and that is why we propose some of the changes in the Bill. We also want to encourage the building of more affordable social and shared-ownership housing to meet the needs of people in all sorts of circumstances.

Yvette Cooper: My hon. Friend is right. We must not simply build more homes, but better homes. That includes cutting carbon emissions from new homes. We have set the most ambitious target of any country in the world—that all new homes should be zero-carbon by 2016. Before that, we want proposals for eco-towns and smaller developments that will reach much higher environmental standards right across the development, not only for the homes but also for the pubs, clubs and schools—even eco-offices.

Yvette Cooper: My hon. Friend makes an important point. She will know that the Housing Corporation is tasked to deliver the Mayor's affordable housing strategy in London and we certainly envisage the Homes and Communities Agency being able to do the same thing. We would expect it to support the Mayor in his strong promotion of affordable housing and his target that 50 per cent. of homes put forward through the planning system should be affordable. I notice that the Opposition's mayoral candidate, the hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Johnson), has rejected that target. That is a sad indictment of his lack of commitment to affordable housing in the capital.

Grant Shapps: I beg to move,
	That this House declines to give a Second Reading to the Housing and Regeneration Bill because it creates a top-down, centrally-driven approach to development and regeneration, allows the unaccountable Homes and Communities Agency, in conjunction with the unelected regional development agencies, to ride roughshod over local communities, takes further powers away from democratically-elected local authorities and places them in the hands of politically-appointed Homes and Communities Agency officials, does not extend to social tenants proper rights to buy or part-buy their homes, fails to address the growing problems with the Housing Market Renewal and Thames Gateway regeneration schemes and provides insufficient measures to promote genuine brownfield regeneration, choice for social tenants, wider home ownership and the raising of environmental standards in house building.
	At 169 pages and 280 clauses with 10 schedules, the Bill is particularly large. The fact that the explanatory notes stretch to 121 pages suggests that it is probably also overly complex. What does the Bill say? One of the first things it tells us is that the Housing Minister intends to merge the Housing Corporation with English Partnerships to form the new Homes and Communities Agency.
	After the Government spent £167 billion on quangos in the past year alone, perhaps the Minister has finally realised that getting rid of a quango would be a good thing to do. But does she not realise that more bureaucracy will not equal more homes? Sadly, if one wades through the Bill to page 36, one discovers that the Government could not help themselves. Clause 80 creates a brand-new quango, the Office for Tenants and Social Landlords, which, I am reliably informed, will be called Oftenant. The Bill is a classic piece of new Labour draftsmanship—it deletes two quangos but then sets up two more.
	The aims of the Homes and Communities Agency are laudable enough, but the Government have misjudged our housing challenge by creating a bulging piece of legislation that simply replicates the failed measures of the past. They are introducing a top-down, Whitehall-driven, centrally controlled, big-Government-know-best approach, while local people and their communities are having their powers stripped away.

Paul Beresford: What the hon. Member for Edmonton (Mr. Love) failed to note is the key point about local authorities. They are the key to regeneration and the Government have ridden roughshod over them with yet another quango. Money is being deprived from them, and they are having their powers taken away. It is another nail in their coffin.

Grant Shapps: I apologise to the hon. Member for Milton Keynes, South-West (Dr. Starkey). I believed that we would get a clear answer to the question. The Bill constitutes a missed opportunity if it does not do what I imagined—give control to the Homes and Communities Agency for the development. I still have not heard whether that will happen—perhaps we will get clarification at some stage.
	The Bill is a missed opportunity to reduce expensive regional quangos and return powers to democratically elected bodies. As some critics fear, it may be a house building delivery agent, but without tackling the problem of the provision of local infrastructure and jobs.
	Since hon. Members of all parties agree about the importance of building homes, the Bill could have achieved something truly historic. However, whereas a progressive approach could deliver millions more homes by working with local communities, the Bill falls back on the tired old Government  v. the people syndrome. By incentivising and trusting the people, we could create sustainable communities, higher environmental standards and more affordable housing.
	Instead, the Government have again completely missed the point. They have failed to reach their existing house building targets, but they have not bothered to ask why. They have simply published a Bill that proposes a bigger stick, a bigger state and bigger targets, but we simply cannot live in targets.
	We all recall that the Prime Minister would not trust the people when he bottled the election. At a time when the competency of the Government is under attack as never before, the Bill is a missed opportunity to trust local people to help solve the housing crisis. We trust local people, and that is why we cannot support the Second Reading tonight.

Phyllis Starkey: I would simply point out to the hon. Gentleman that, as he knows, only two interventions can be taken, otherwise time is eroded, unlike with Front-Bench spokespersons, and I am barely into my speech.
	The second group that I would have thought should concern almost every Member comprises those constituents whose incomes are too low for them ever to conceive of buying a house or even entering shared ownership, who are wholly dependent on the social rented market and who have no hope whatever of being allocated a social rented house. In my constituency—I assume that the situation is the same in a great many others—the only people who can get into social rented housing who are not there already are individuals who are statutorily homeless and in extreme housing need, although even they will not necessarily get into social rented housing.
	The local council in my area—I am not blaming the council, Liberal Democrat-controlled though it is—is now obliged to advise people who come to it as statutorily homeless that there are no social rented houses available. Those people are given advice on how they can be placed in the private rented sector or in temporary accommodation elsewhere, and be funded through housing benefit. That is a disgraceful situation, and the prime solution is to build more houses, including more affordable shared ownership and social rented houses. I was disappointed that the Conservatives gave no indication of the level of house building that they would propose.
	I was interested to see in  The Guardian that Mr. George Monbiot—who, 30 years ago, used to live extremely close to me in the area that I represented as a councillor—has suddenly discovered that there are people who live in appalling social and private rented accommodation. He could have found that out 30 years ago in his own street if he had only asked me.
	I am pleased that the Government are now increasing the funding for housing in general, and for social housing in particular, and that they are putting in place mechanisms to provide additional funding from developers for infrastructure. The Milton Keynes tariff has been an extremely useful model for that. I am also pleased that they are setting higher targets, although I think that it will be incredibly difficult for them to deliver on them.
	I remain extremely upset that the Conservatives are apparently opposing the Bill, despite the fact that it is broadly supported by Shelter, the Local Government Association—which is Tory controlled—the National Housing Federation, the National Federation of ALMOs, Help the Aged and even the Tories' favourite organisation, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. All those bodies broadly welcome the Bill. That reinforces my view that Tory support for more housing is based on the model of St. Augustine. They say, "Yes, but not now" or perhaps "Yes, but not in my constituency."
	Turning to the Bill, the Homes and Communities Agency will bring together the regeneration expertise of English Partnerships with the housing expertise of the Housing Corporation. I commend the Housing Corporation in particular on its recent good track record on increasing the proportion of family homes in social housing developments in London and the south-east. The Select Committee has stressed that that issue is not simply about numbers; it is also about the range of housing available. There is a desire for considerably more family housing in most, though not all, areas, and I am pleased that the Housing Corporation has taken that on board and been delivering such housing in London and the south-east.
	Amalgamating the expertise and the powers of the two bodies should result in a saving of resources and a sharing of expertise between an organisation that has concentrated on regeneration and one that has concentrated on housing. I have already remarked on the fact that it is odd that the Conservatives are opposed to the establishment of the agency, when the Public Accounts Committee report on the Thames Gateway said that the agency, rather than all the fragmented local bodies, should take responsibility in that area.

Phyllis Starkey: The Milton Keynes partnership—a joint committee comprising the local authority and English Partnerships—is delivering on house building in our area, where such delivery was not occurring before. Most people in my area want more housing. Of course there are arguments about individual estates and individual development frameworks, but the council remains the overall planning authority. The partnership is delivering housing in our area within the development framework set by the council. The council often attempts to hide behind the partnership, or the Government, so that it will not be held responsible for the decisions that it has taken—on the grid roads in Milton Keynes, for example—but the reality is that it is the council, as the planning authority, that takes those decisions. The decisions are implemented in parts of Milton Keynes by the council, and in other parts by the Milton Keynes partnership and English Partnerships.
	The hon. Gentleman asked me a specific question about my constituency, and I enter a plea for the headquarters of the new agency to be in Milton Keynes. It is the obvious place for it to be, and such a move would save having to build new offices. I am grateful to him for allowing me to make that point on behalf of my constituency.
	There is an issue about the relationship of the new agency to local authorities. I suggest that the Minister look closely at whether there should be a duty on the new agency to co-operate with them, as it may not be enough for the HCA simply to be a named partner in local area agreements.
	I welcome the establishment of a regulator—Oftenant—and I am pleased that it is separate from the HCA's provider role. The regulator will give tenants much greater rights and allow them to challenge poorly performing housing associations, but I urge the Minister to consider extending Oftenant to council tenants and arm's length management organisations as soon as possible, which the Local Government Association and the National Federation of ALMOs. I also urge her to take up Shelter's suggestion that there should be enabling powers for a national tenants' voice.
	On sustainability certificates, the code for sustainable homes is absolutely essential in signposting for builders and developers the direction in which building regulations standards will be improved and made more stringent. It should give the builders and developers the certainty that they need to deliver the higher standards that we are all asking for and to achieve the zero carbon target by 2016. I ask the Minister seriously to consider making the code for sustainable homes mandatory on new homes, and also urge the Government to find ways of extending the code to existing homes. Existing homes comprise about 99 per cent. of the housing stock and they are much less energy efficient than new houses, so we need seriously to improve the energy efficiency of existing stock. The Minister might consider, for example, setting dates—reasonably far in the distance—by which every home must be made compliant with at least the bottom two levels in the code for sustainable homes.
	I am hugely doubtful about what exactly the Conservatives are suggesting in respect of sustainability. Although they mention it in their amendment, as a kind of ritual obeisance, we have absolutely no indication of what those words mean.

Paul Holmes: Many councils around the country have enormous problems with affordable housing, not least when council properties are sold to private speculators who take them out of circulation and then let them to students.
	The dramatic increase in council house waiting lists has caused two problems. The first is the human misery that I see in my surgery every Friday afternoon, including last Friday. People who are desperate for suitable housing have little hope of being able to move into an old folks' bungalow, which would free up a family council house, or to move into a family house when they are sleeping on sofas, in their in-laws' living rooms or in friends' houses.

Paul Holmes: I agree that there is a huge problem. One of the reasons is that the regulations that decide what constitutes overcrowding date back to 1935 and the depression. They date not only from 70 years ago, but from an entirely different world, where people's living conditions were far inferior and overcrowding was accepted as normal. I hope that we will be able to table amendments in Committee to see whether we can get the Government to move in the direction of redefining overcrowding in modern terms. One of the reasons why they will be reluctant to do so is that 1.63 million are on the waiting list, and if we redefined overcrowding to meet modern standards, far more people would be deemed to be in unsuitable housing and, therefore, in priority need of rehousing.
	We must consider not only the human misery of waiting lists and out-of-date definitions, but the open goal that is provided to racists. My constituency has few immigrants and almost no asylum seekers, and they almost all live in privately owned or privately rented properties. Even in such a constituency, people who complain about the lack of council housing regularly say, "It is all because they are taking our houses." The situation is an open goal for racists and the British National party. It has been stoked up by 10 years of policy from this Government. They have denied the provision of council housing and have presided over a collapse in the provision of any alternative form of social rented housing. I welcome the Green Paper, including the parts of it that have found their way into this Bill, but it is 10 years too late.

Paul Holmes: This is a major issue for people who are on benefits. Traditionally, of course, councils provided the housing for that part of the population, but they have been denied that for the past 10 years and little has been provided to replace it. It is often said that the press have power without responsibility. These days, councils have increasing responsibility without power.
	The Bill contains one clause that rightly says that members of the armed forces should be able to establish a local link. Often when people come out of the armed forces they are simply rejected by every council to which they apply—even the one for their former home area—because by being in the armed forces and moving around they have lost the link. Again, a responsibility is being given to local authorities without the power to do anything about the situation. We need to reverse that ridiculous state of affairs.
	The Green Paper and the Bill contain too little on sustainability, on affordability and on social housing to rent. On sustainability, we have heard the talk of 10 eco-towns. Some 40 local authorities said that they wanted to build an eco-town, but only 10 are to be allowed to do so. That is a symptom of the central control and diktat under which we operate. Even 40 such towns would only have scratched the surface. Government legislation wants all new houses to be built to eco-standards from 2016, but we feel that that could be done from 2011—Germany already does it. Whether it is done by 2016 or 2011, the provision ignores the question of the existing housing stock. By 2050, two thirds of our housing stock will be properties that are already built, most of which will be from the 20th( )and 19th centuries, and even earlier. The Government's Warm Front scheme would take 120 years to get round that existing housing stock and would provide relatively low levels of insulation and upgrading. Much more is needed if we are to tackle sustainability issues.
	On affordability, again too much is disappointing in what the Government propose. When "affordable houses" first go on sale they are not affordable at all—flats in London that cost £200,000 or £300,000 are not remotely affordable for most people. When such properties are sold on, they are certainly not affordable. We believe that 25 per cent. of the 3 million houses that the Government want to build over the next 13 years—we would like them to be built over the next 10 years—should be affordable. Affordability should be locked in from day one, and at every resale. We should consider schemes such as shared equity, which the Liberal Democrats in South Shropshire implemented, and community land trusts, which could certainly use the brownfield sites that Government have identified to release for housing.  [ Interruption. ] They are not gimmicks: they have worked in pilot schemes in the UK, in many European countries—especially in Scandinavia—and in the United States. Indeed, the Army, which intends to relocate 6,000 families from the British Army of the Rhine to the west midlands, is lobbying the Ministry of Defence for an Army land trust for that purpose for Army personnel. It is not a gimmick, but a mainstream policy that could ensure that houses are affordable when first sold and every time they are resold, because the price of the land is not available as it is locked into the community for ever.
	The Government's proposals contain far too little on social housing to rent. Some 25 per cent. of the 3 million new houses should be social housing to rent. Crisis and Shelter would probably put the percentage even higher, at 30 per cent. or 35 per cent. The big difference that I have with the Government on the issue is the need for a level playing field for the 140 to 200 authorities—depending on whether one counts the ALMOs—in which tenants voted democratically against a stock transfer. Even when the tenants had a loaded financial shotgun to their heads—they were told, "Transfer and get your houses modernised or stay with the council and be starved of funds"—they voted to stay with the council, in some cases, such as Camden, by four to one. For the Government to tell those tenants that they have to rot in those houses, and that their council cannot build any new houses, is a moral outrage and a democratic disgrace.

George Young: What I want is a provision in the Bill which obliges somebody to run a national mobility scheme. I hope that if an amendment along those lines is tabled and if the hon. Lady is on the Committee, it might have her support.
	The main thrust of the Bill is basically to split the Housing Corporation into two, and adds extra functions to each half. On to the investment half is tacked English Partnerships, and on to the regulatory half is tacked Oftenant, which will eventually cover all social tenants. The social housing landscape will change significantly when the Bill goes through. It is worth pausing to reflect that the most successful private finance initiative that the country has ever seen has been the Housing Corporation. Some £35 billion has been invested in social housing, with not one default. If one compares that with private finance initiatives in health, transport or defence, one can see that it is a fantastic record. One could argue that instead of abolishing the Housing Corporation, the Government should be cloning it.
	It is vital—I pick up a point that the right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich made—that, in the new landscape, we continue to generate substantial private capital to invest in social housing, and nothing in the Bill should prejudice that aim. In particular, the new regulator must not cause housing associations to be reclassified as public sector bodies. I remember the so-called Ryrie rules, which meant that the private funds raised by housing associations scored as public expenditure, wholly negating the advantage of borrowing from the City. We must not return to those days, and we need to address the concern of the National Housing Federation that the regulator might inadvertently so reclassify. That would be a shot not so much in the foot but much higher up.
	On the case for the abolition or splitting of the Housing Corporation, which was set up some 40 years ago, there has been a rather academic debate as to whether the dual responsibilities of the corporation—regulation on the one hand, and investment on the other—complemented or compromised each other. I tended to be in the complementary camp, for the reason that I have just mentioned. There was an implicit reassurance for investors that regulation of housing associations would have an eye on the lenders, as well as on the tenants. Having both functions under one roof meant that money was not lent to housing associations, for example, where there were doubts about corporate management, and there was a one-stop shop for housing associations.
	I hope that under the new regime we are not heading for a Northern Rock-type scenario by spreading responsibility for housing associations over more than one institution, with the new HCA being a sort of Bank of England in control of the money supply, and the new Oftenant being in control of regulation, with a possibility of confusion and regulatory failure.
	As the Minister said when she introduced the Bill, the HCA is about supply, and there has been much emphasis on the need for 3 million new homes. Supply should, of course, be increased, and we all want to see faster help for those in housing need. However, I must make a basic point: the quickest and cheapest way to help those on the waiting list is to create vacancies for them in the existing housing stock. For those on the waiting list, the statistic that matters is not the number of new social houses built, but the number of re-lets in the existing housing stock. We should be doing far more to accelerate the number of re-lets by helping those whose circumstances have improved to do what many of them want to do, namely become home owners. The part of the Housing Corporation budget that promotes mobility has been squeezed, and I hope that the HCA will revisit that balance. In turn, that would help to encourage demand at the lower end of the housing market and give confidence to house builders. If we are to hit the ambitious target, we must look to the private sector as much as possible to build the new homes rather than the public sector.

Andrew Love: One of the most interesting findings in the Hills report is that the number of re-lets in the public sector is decreasing rapidly and that the only way to address that particular problem is to build new supply.

George Young: I agree that if one is going to incentivise existing tenants to move out, it should be accompanied by measures to increase supply in the private sector, otherwise one will simply drive up house prices. If one were to do the first, one would need to do the second in order to avoid house price inflation.
	On a related question about the balance of the budget, there is nothing in the Bill about private sector renewal, because the funds come from elsewhere. However, the emphasis on affordable housing, which has been brought forward from the Green Paper, has pre-empted a huge chunk of the overall housing budget. If, for example, one examines the small print of the comprehensive spending review 2007—the public service agreement 2007, as was—one sees that the target for decent homes has been deleted. The improvement of social rented homes to decent standards is now one of 198 optional indicators in local authority agreements. There are now no indicators relating to the improvement of private stock or to the specific delivery of adaptations. The housing pot will be under enormous pressure to deliver the targets for new affordable homes, and the initial indications are that there will be substantial reductions in other parts of the housing budget and particularly those parts of it that go to private sector renewal.
	I am the chairman of a small national charity, the Foundations Independent Living Trust, which helps elderly or disabled people on low incomes to stay in their homes, or to return to their homes after they have been in hospital, by working through home improvement agencies. More and more older people are home owners and want to live with dignity in their own homes for as long as possible. Home improvement agencies face enormous pressure on improvement grants, and there is a real risk that by putting so many eggs in the new build social housing basket, the Government will pay a price elsewhere on the housing front.
	My main concern about the Bill is the balance between the HCA on the one hand and local authorities and housing associations on the other so far as delivery is concerned. I believe in devolving down, so the job of building houses or communities is for local government or housing associations—it is not a job for a new national quango. The Housing Corporation did not build homes directly. If one examines the powers being given to the HCA and the language used by Ministers, it appears that the HCA will displace existing delivery agents and centralise decisions that are currently taken locally. The Chartered Institute of Housing got it right when it said that it saw the HCA as "providing flexible tailored support". The HCA should be an enabler—a sort of godfather. The notes on the Bill tell us that it will be able to establish new communities or work to regenerate or develop existing communities, buy land and provide employment and training opportunities. It even has powers to preserve trees, deal with antisocial behaviour and own houses. That poses the question: why are housing associations or local authorities not performing those functions? The Bill sits rather uneasily with what is stated in "Homes for the Future":
	"We want to see local authorities step up to play a stronger role in addressing the housing needs of all residents. We want to see them develop their strategic housing role by using the full range of housing and land use planning powers".
	Yet clauses 13 to 17 take those powers from local authorities and give them to someone else. If a new town is going to be built, then of course a new town corporation needs those powers, but rebuilding existing communities should be done by democratically elected and accountable local authorities working in partnership with housing associations that have their roots in those communities.
	On Oftenant, I hope that we will get light-touch regulation leaving housing associations to get on with the job, not go back to the old days of prescriptive regulation and interference. The Bill suggests that the regulator's functions go way beyond those relating to housing and intrude into other areas. Environmental and social and economic well-being functions also come under the regulator, whereas if they were carried out by anybody else, they would not. There is a risk of regulatory creep.
	Clause 173 gives the regulator powers on rents. We need to think through how his powers on housing association rents will impact on local authority rents, because there is still a gap in many parts of the country.
	On clause 54, I am surprised that we are still running down the new towns. I thought that I wound up the last of the new towns in the 1980s. It was argued then that we could not dump all the land in Milton Keynes on to the market. Yet here we are, 20 years later, still making provision for what the Commission for the New Towns owns.
	I welcome the provision regarding members of the armed forces, who tend to miss out when it comes to the allocation of housing. Does the relevant clause cover wives in circumstances where the marriage breaks up and the husband leaves the Army, leaving the wife and family behind in married quarters?
	There will be upheaval and turbulence, and there will be a cost, which risks diverting attention. I want a regime that decentralises, resources and empowers those in the front line, and guides and helps in delivering the new homes that the country needs; I do not want over-regulation, duplication or centralisation. The Government will have to be very careful if they are to get that balance right.

Jeremy Corbyn: I welcome this opportunity to have another serious debate about housing needs. As one who represents an inner-city constituency that is very much up against it, I look forward to the possibility of conquering at least some of our housing problems.
	It is worth putting on record that during the past 10 years there has been a phenomenal amount of investment in the decent homes standard, which has delivered a great improvement, and in improving the common parts of estates. That is very welcome. Lectures from the Tories about social housing policy sit rather ill when those of us who were in this House throughout most of the Thatcher and Major years remember how local authorities were starved of funds to undertake basic repairs. In 1997, the incoming Labour Government inherited a massive backlog of repairs and disorder in estates and housing. Now is the time—perhaps it is well past the time—to move on to building housing for people in very desperate housing need; and they do not come more desperate than people living in inner-London constituencies.
	Like all my colleagues, I hold regular advice bureaux and I am heartbroken every week by the stories of overcrowding, tensions in families, illness that spreads between children because they are unable to have separate bedrooms and of underachievement in school and over-participation in criminal activity because of factors relating largely to housing shortages and gross overcrowding. As a country, we have to do something about that and do it very quickly indeed.
	It is not just in the council housing sector that people are living in poor quality, overcrowded housing. As my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes, South-West (Dr. Starkey) and others have pointed out, when homeless families present themselves to a local housing authority, the arm's length management organisation, if there is one, or the council's housing department, if it still has that form of management, increasingly cannot do anything for them, so they are then put into a private sector, privately rented place, through a rent deposit scheme.
	I have visited far too many of the privately rented flats into which councils put people, and I can tell the House that they are appalling, disgusting, badly repaired, badly maintained, and they often have an absentee or distant landlord who does not care what is going on there. And for the most part, we are paying the bill for that through housing benefit. I have come across people whose rent of £300 per week or more is paid largely by housing benefit. As I explained to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions last week, I have no quarrel whatsoever with the principle of housing benefit being used to pay rent. I do, however, have a problem with paying rent for poor quality places and—I know this is not the subject of the debate, but I would like to draw the House's attention to it—the increasing existence of a benefit trap created by high private sector rents.
	If someone gets a job, they lose their jobseeker's allowance or income support; they probably lose all or most of their housing benefit; and they can only get a maximum of £60-a—week in-work benefit for people returning to work. I welcome the principle of that benefit, but it goes nowhere near meeting housing costs for inner London or, I suspect, other parts of the country either. We are creating a perverse trap that I am sure no one intended to create, but our function is surely to try to do something about it.

Jeremy Corbyn: I was going to come on to housing associations in a moment, but I accept my right hon. Friend's point. Although the Bill does not go far in the direction of regulating rents in the private sector—if it does so at all—we have to consider that issue. The private sector rented market in many parts of this country is in effect a housing benefit rented market because such benefit is paid into it more than anything else. We have to consider such issues seriously. In London, where the shortage of all forms of housing is most acute, we have problems with people buying to rent. That money ought to be better invested in social housing rather than just being poured into the pockets of private landlords. I know that the Minister is aware of that, and is concerned about it. It is something we can and should do a great deal more about.
	As I have pointed out, because of existing housing legislation there is a growing tendency for tenants to be forced into a choice of going into an ALMO or staying with the local authority. Hitherto, unfortunately, opting for an ALMO attracted subsidy, debt write-off and investment, while staying with the council did not. ALMOs exist in most parts of the country. In some cases, they work all right, and in some, they work very well indeed. However, I hope the Minister will be able to help me with a governance issue when he responds. At the end of the day, councillors in elected local authorities are responsible for what their authorities do. If something goes dramatically badly wrong in housing and the service is run directly by the local housing authority, a councillor has to answer for that. It is not the same under an ALMO. People might well be elected to the board of it, but they assume a corporate identity and corporate responsibility on election. It is not a responsive election process designed for the tenants or leaseholders who have elected the board, but for the perceived needs of that board. I would prefer a more robust democratic process.
	The Bill deals with registered social landlords—housing associations. Although I acknowledge that they are now the major providers of new homes for social and secure rent throughout the country, they have had, increasingly, to borrow large sums of money. Under the Tories, the proportion that they borrowed increased a great deal and, because they borrowed so much, they have to balance their books and far too many RSLs now finance improvements to their properties to fulfil the decent homes standards by selling existing properties. In an area of high housing stress, such as my constituency and those of many of my hon. Friends, it makes no sense to sell housing association properties to do up the remaining such stock. I am sure that everybody recognises that every house sold means that somebody else is staying longer in private or hostel accommodation and not having their housing needs met. Surely we can do better than that.
	I should like us, first, to stop RSLs developing into property companies that buy and sell land and deal increasingly in selling existing properties and, secondly, to examine seriously the governance issue that affects housing associations and introduce much more tenant participation and democracy into their running, instead of the direction in which they have unfortunately been going in the past few years.
	I want to speak briefly about planning in London. London is growing fast and the Mayor has done his best to try to ensure that 50 per cent. of all major new developments provide what he calls affordable homes. I asked the Department for a definition of affordability and I got one, which I think I understand, but it was not the answer that I wanted. Affordability means that a person on an ordinary living wage in a community can afford a property. Eighty per cent. of my constituents—I suspect that those of my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) are in the same boat—have no chance of buying on the open market in our constituencies. Even those on professional salaries have no chance. Many properties that are on sale for key workers or for part rent-part purchase are also way beyond the reach of anyone locally. We are not providing affordable homes, but simply calling something affordable. Developers are good at describing something as affordable to get planning permission but simultaneously claiming that they cannot meet communities' social housing needs.
	I want us to be tougher on planning law and tougher with the developers. We should tell them, "If you want to develop in inner London or any other part of the country with high housing stress, we want at least half the housing to be affordable rented accommodation." That means controlled, fixed-rent accommodation. Far too much development is unaffordable and not proper social housing. Although few social homes—for want of a better term—have been built in my borough in the past few years, far too many of those that have been built are one or two-bedroom flats when family housing is desperately needed. There is nothing more depressing than a large family in a small flat or house, who know that there is no chance for several years, until the kids have grown up, of getting anywhere decent to live. Imagine how miserable that is for the kids and imagine the tension that that creates. We all pay the price through failure in education and many other areas of society because we do not house people properly.
	We are beginning to turn the corner on housing policy. I wish that we did not have such an obsession with owner-occupation when we should be obsessed with decent homes for all. The hon. Member for Chesterfield (Paul Holmes) asked the Minister many questions. I hope that, in answer to some of them, social renting and people in housing need are not defined in such a way that someone who is unemployed or on benefits and is allocated a council or housing association flat has it taken away from them because they get on fairly well and find a reasonable job in a profession. Surely, as the Government often tell us, strength lies in mixed communities. A council estate or a housing association block is a mixed community— long may it stay that way. I want a clear answer from the Minister at the end of this debate saying that that can be achieved.
	My absolutely final point is about family policy and housing policy. Our society is changing and will continue to do so. The Minister for Housing acknowledged that in her opening remarks and others have said it too. We have far more single households and far more people living in extended families, and all kinds of other complicated relationships. It is time that housing allocation policy caught up with that. If a divorce happens and a family breaks up, that is obviously sad, but these things happen and we have to try to provide the children with the best opportunity that we can to have good contact with the parents. If the parent who does not have full residence with the children is offered no social housing whatever and ends up in a bedsit, that is damaging to that parent's relationship with the children—it is usually the father—and to the children themselves.
	I know that it is expensive, complicated and difficult, but surely we are here as a Parliament to try to do something about those with desperate housing needs. That includes children and everybody else. The Bill will give us an opportunity, I hope, to invest in housing need and start to transform the lives that have been blighted by the free market, private landlord system, which too many people have to live under at the present time.

Maria Miller: I am pleased to take part in this debate, because housing is probably one of the most important issues in my constituency. I should like to focus my remarks on the powers and responsibilities of the new Homes and Communities Agency, in part 1 of the Bill, and how they might be better looked at.
	I should like to start with the role of the HCA and its ability to take planning power away from local authorities. We in this Chamber represent a wide diversity of constituencies shaped by local history, local economies and, importantly, our locally elected representatives. The Bill paves the way for a potential dislocation of planning the future of our communities from the people who live in them. I am concerned that provisions in the Bill will mean that the HCA may have the opportunity to take local control away from towns identified as centres for growth. Basingstoke has been identified by the South East England Development Agency as a diamond for growth. That is something that we are proud of, but equally we feel that we need to keep control over how that develops within our community. I look to the Minister who will be winding up this debate to reassure me that that will be the case, because constituencies such as mine are the lifeblood of the country. They provide jobs and wealth, and it is important that they should continue to be as successful as they are now.
	I should also like to mention the ability of the HCA to acquire land under schedule 3 and, with the Secretary of State's consent, to acquire land compulsorily that it could then use for planning and development, which is a far-reaching power. I suppose that I am particularly interested in that provision, because in my constituency we have already felt the Secretary of State's hand and her ability to intervene in local planning decisions, in the decision on the German road development in Bramley. Despite two planning reports, including one from the Government's own planning inspectorate, which said that developing 400 houses on a narrow plot of land in the village was unsustainable, the Secretary of State felt that the Government knew better and could come in and mandate that the development should go ahead.
	I am therefore cautious about the intervention of the Government in such matters. Perhaps the Minister could reassure me on when the new quango would be able to intervene in such circumstances. I am thinking in particular of an area to the west of my constituency called Manydown locally. The area has been earmarked for major development, with perhaps 100,000 houses to be built over the years, and is currently owned by the local district authority and the local county council. It has been decided, again as a result of a local planning inquiry, that developing that land at this point is inappropriate. Would the new HCA simply be able to intervene, acquire the land compulsorily and go ahead with planning, despite the views of local residents and locally elected representatives at both the county and borough levels? Perhaps the Minister will turn his remarks to that when he sums up.
	It is also interesting to read the wide-ranging powers that the new body would have under the Bill with regard to open spaces, such as commons and allotments. In my constituency and, I am sure, those of other hon. Members present, local residents set great store by the ability to have open space in their communities. In my constituency, allotments are an important source of enjoyment and quality of life for many residents, who use them to great effect. Are we to believe that local authorities such as mine that try to protect those areas of land from development could be penalised?

Maria Miller: I thank the hon. Lady for such a useful intervention. I can tell her exactly how many new homes Basingstoke needs, because as I said at the beginning, housing is an issue that we take seriously. I have been told by local officials that we need around 600 houses a year in Basingstoke, but Government targets have dictated that we are currently building 1,000 units a year. We are happy to shoulder some of the burden imposed by the deficit of housing in the area, but in my area we are fortunate to have an unemployment rate of only 1 per cent. The hon. Lady will probably know where I am going with this one, but that low unemployment rate means that we are dragging more people in my area—it is a great place to live and I am proud to represent such a great part of north Hampshire—who then have to go outside Basingstoke to seek jobs.
	We are obviously concerned about the importance of protecting the green spaces in our communities. Indeed, some of those green spaces have become an integral part of our drainage system, for example. As some hon. Members may be aware, in the 1960s the London overspill was built into the heart of our community and is now an important part of what makes Basingstoke a thriving place. The construction of those estates relied on quite large amounts of open space surrounding them, to ensure that flooding did not occur. Are we to imagine that under the Bill those estates will lose those open spaces, which are so integral to their design, or will we see investment for further improvements in our drainage systems, after the tremendous amount of flooding in the recent summer storms?
	There are other elements of concern in the Bill, which I am sure will be considered in more detail by those who are fortunate to serve on the Committee. I refer in particular to the ability of the new HCA to acquire burial grounds and other religious sites for development. I am sure that that would only ever be done in a sensitive manner, but the way it is described in the Bill perhaps needs a little more detail, to ensure that it does not cause any concern or possible uncertainty in communities such as mine.
	I should like to turn to the responsibilities of the new quango organisation in relation to infrastructure. Infrastructure improvement is not currently going hand in hand with the house building targets that the Government are foisting on the south-east of England. I was somewhat concerned by some of the language in the Bill relating to the responsibility of the HCA to provide infrastructure. It states, for example, that the agency "may" provide infrastructure. The terms used are vague and lack specificity. In particular, the Bill lacks a commitment to ensure that any house building targets will be matched by improvements in local services.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps) expressed the view very succinctly in his opening speech that infrastructure needs to be guaranteed, and I should like to reiterate that on behalf of my constituents, who are suffering from a lack of investment in infrastructure locally. That is now starting to cause significant problems of traffic congestion on our roads, and on main arterial highways such as the M3. I am running a strong local campaign, with the support of about 1,000 residents, to get remedial measures put in place at junction 6 of the M3 to deal with the congestion problems there. The Minister might be interested to learn that those problems have resulted in two fatalities in the past two years.
	The Government also need to explain how the HCA is to be held to account. If there is to be no obligation to ensure that a sufficiency of local services goes hand in hand with any house building programme, how are we to ensure that the agency can be held to account?
	I should like to highlight a couple of measures that I would have liked to see in the Bill. First, and perhaps most importantly for my constituents, there are no measures to tackle the barriers that still exist to prevent first-time buyers from getting into the market. It is all well and good to talk about housing targets and building more houses—we are building 1,000 new houses a year in my constituency—when all that we have seen over the past decade are house price rises that have outstripped any increase in wage inflation.
	I should also have liked to see a provision in the Bill to ensure that enough family homes with gardens are built, rather than the high-rise blocks that are increasingly becoming the trend throughout the country. The hon. Member for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn) also made that point in his speech. In my constituency surgery, I meet families who are being forced into accommodation that simply does not provide sufficient space for them to bring up their children in the way that they want to. I am concerned that my local authority is being forced to give permission for the building of more tower blocks when my constituents need more family homes. It would also have been useful to incorporate in more detail provisions to encourage the development of more community land trusts, which would give residents the ability to participate in purchasing their own homes at a reasonable price. Many people have an aspiration to own their own home for their family.
	I have just returned from an interesting trip to visit our armed forces in Afghanistan, and I am pleased to see that the Bill contains provisions to help ex-armed forces personnel to find accommodation. That issue has caused particular concern in my constituency. I hope that the Minister will be able to respond to some of the points that I have raised, which are important issues, not only in my constituency but throughout the south-east and the rest of the country, and are worthy of consideration.

Ken Purchase: I hope that no one with any experience and knowledge of the conditions in their constituencies would wish to oppose the promise of 3 million new dwellings. I hope that that goes without saying. I shall support the Second Reading, but I hope that a number of amendments will be made in Committee to improve its narrative. As I see it at the moment, its narrative is "Private good, public bad", and that needs to be challenged and dealt with properly in detail in Committee.
	It is right to remind ourselves that, immediately before the Conservative Government of 1979, about a quarter of families lived in local authority housing. About 5 million local authority dwellings formed part of the general housing stock of 20 million homes. The figure has now shrunk to about one seventh. That has coincided with the present crisis—I have to use that word—in housing. People might say that that is a spurious statistic, but I do not believe that it is. We can all find examples in our constituencies to support the idea that there is a strong, direct correlation between the loss of publicly rented housing that was subsidised for the public good—I shall mention the S-word again later—and our present problems.
	I regret to say that, in my constituency, under a Labour Government, the waiting list for local authority—now ALMO—dwellings is longer than it was at any time under the Thatcher Government. I am almost ashamed to stand here and say that. I cannot help but draw the conclusion that that is directly related to the disastrous policy not of selling council houses but of giving them away. A situation was allowed to develop in which people bought their houses at rock-bottom prices, found that they could then move into the proper private ownership sector, and left their houses to be let by an agent. I shall come back to that issue in a moment as well; it is a very serious matter in my constituency.
	I welcome the building of 3 million additional dwellings, but I say to the Government that it is important to know how we are going to do it, and what proportion will stay where. At the risk of being described as a militant I suggest that at least one third of those houses should be built, controlled and managed by our local authorities. That is essential. I also think that perhaps 1 or 2 per cent. should be developed and managed by housing associations, and I will tell the House why. The great Anthony Crosland, who knew about these things, recognised that local authorities had to have policies that could be seen to be consistent, fair and even-handed between one applicant and another. They therefore devised points schemes that recognised the different factors that affected someone's need—or not, as the case may be—for a local authority dwelling.
	Housing associations have had no such problem. They are usually organised by voluntary groups, often involving people known as do-gooders. Do-gooders are always better than do-badders, as far as I am concerned. The associations were able to meet the needs of those who fell outside the points scheme, however broadly defined it might have been. They have therefore played a vital role in allowing people that little bit of flexibility that the local authority, with the best will in the world, could not provide.
	Two thirds of the rest of the homes were owned by the people who lived in them, and I would also advocate that strongly. The Labour party was never opposed to people owning their own homes; we just objected to the ownership of homes by private landlords. We had learned the lessons from 1903 or 1904, when more than 90 per cent. of all houses in this country were owned by private landlords. We all saw, read about, knew of and understood the conditions that prevailed for the vast majority of families and people throughout those years. Then, however, came the giants.
	In 1945, we had a Government who understood that the very best contribution to improvement in public health was publicly owned, built and managed housing—better even than the national health service itself. On the shoulders of giants such as Bevan—and, indeed, Attlee for facilitating it—Stafford Cripps, Dalton and others and more recently the great Anthony Crosland, who preceded my hon. Friend the Minister who is in his place, we understood not only that people had a desire to own their houses but that a capitalist society, sub-divided and stratified as it is, needed a facility to look after its own and to be able to say with pride, "We have a stock of housing that is fit for purpose and occupation and shall be occupied by people who at any time require and need it."
	Yet, since those days, particularly under the Conservative Government, we have seen that very practical scheme taken apart. We saw the sale—not really a sale, but a giveaway—of council houses. What happened was based on the ideas of a person who used to represent one of the constituencies in my city of Wolverhampton—Enoch Powell, who said, "All these council estates should be broken up into small parts and sold off to private landlords." Well, we have come close to that with the new industry of mortgages for buying to let. We are returning to the days at the turn of the 20th century when 90 per cent. of homes were owned by private landlords. How far down the road do we have to go before we understand the lessons that we should have learned?
	What we hear is the great mantra—I am afraid it is new Labour's, too—of diversification, choice, choice and more choice. Let me tell the House that this choice does not come free of charge. To misquote my great hero, Harold Wilson, one man's choice is another man's redundancy, another man's difficulty, another man's inability to get a decent house. We need to understand that these diversities should remain on a very small scale in local communities where willing people come together to do something helpful. Our great thrust should be to recognise that the two thirds-one third split served us extremely well—notwithstanding the fact that some homes were poorly managed; the local electorate had an opportunity to do something about that. We must recognise that there are straight lines which people will understand, are explicable and will meet our needs. No gimmicks.
	Let me deal with suggestions about regulation and Oftenant. I have already heard one or two tenants' leaders describe it as "Bugger Off Tenant". I think that there is a real danger of that becoming the case. Let me tell Members what it can do—

Mike Hancock: Yes, or the girls for that matter. I am also curious to know who will set the punishments that will be afforded to those who offend against Oftenant's regulations.
	The right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) raised two fundamental points that have been generally ignored. One concerned the need for a national mobility scheme to enable tenants to move between authorities. I have seen very good results when people have been given that opportunity. Nowadays a person must be on a witness protection programme to move from, particularly, a London authority.
	The right hon. Gentleman was also right to question the commitment to our armed forces. How easy it is for a service marriage to break down. The serviceman leaves the married quarters, and within days—hours in some cases—a notice to quit is put through the door, telling his wife and children that they are no longer eligible for service accommodation. Where do they go? Do they go to the local authority where the married quarters are, or do they return to the part of the country from which they came, with no help whatever from the military? If the Bill is really to cater for the needs of service families, the Government should understand one of the biggest issues facing conurbations such as mine in south Hampshire—and, for that matter, in north Hampshire and Colchester—where large service units are sited. Fifty per cent. of all naval accommodation is in the greater Portsmouth area, and marriage break-ups in the area cause much suffering among people in that position.
	We have not heard much about regeneration. It will work only if local authorities, housing associations and the private sector and their tenants are brought together in an equally sided triangle. It cannot be forced down people's throats, and it cannot be generated simply by the willingness of a private developer to say, "I will put money into this area, provided that you do what I want you to do." That will immediately alienate the tenants, and probably the local authority as well. The issue needs to be thought through seriously.
	While I agree with many of those who have said that there is much to be welcomed in the Bill, I think that the Minister should consider a sunset clause when it comes to the Homes and Community Agency. It ought to be conditional on whether Labour stays in power. I should be very reluctant to see a Tory Minister with the power that such an agency would deliver. Like Labour Members who have spoken, I was in local government when the Conservatives were in power, and I know how difficult it was.  [Interruption.] The hon. Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) is commenting from not a sedentary but a horizontal position. If he cares to interrupt and put me right, I shall be only too pleased to hear from him.
	I remember from my days in a local authority the way in which local authorities that wanted to develop council housing were punished by the Conservatives, and I should be extremely reluctant to give them the power that goes hand in glove with the establishment of a Homes and Community Agency. I should be extremely nervous if an election ever went the other way.

Anne Main: It is a delight to follow the right hon. Member for Leeds, West (John Battle). He mentioned density, and it was this Government who insisted on a high density of 30 to 50 to the hectare under PPG3 and often overturn my authority when it wishes to build at a lower density. I look forward to the Government giving more control back to the local authorities to build the houses that they want.
	The Homes and Communities Agency will be given a broad set of powers, including the catch-all provision that it
	"may do anything it considers appropriate for the purposes of its objects or for purposes incidental to those purposes."
	It may also
	"impose charges for, or in connection with, anything done by it by virtue of"—
	various sections—
	"of such amounts as the HCA considers to be reasonable."
	The devil will be in the detail, and with 121 pages of detail the Committee will have to consider all aspects of the Bill carefully.
	As a matter of principle, I fully support the rights of local communities to decide how they take shape and grow. Too often, people in my constituency have felt dictated to on housing totals and density by the Government, so are understandably irritated when planning decisions made locally are controversially overturned by the Secretary of State. In Hertfordshire, we face the threat of continually escalating housing totals that we feel are unsustainable and lack supporting infrastructure. Indeed, infrastructure will be key to the Bill. We do not know the eventual housing total for Hertfordshire and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps) said, we have some concerns about density and sustainability.

Anne Main: I agree that high density schemes can be well designed. Indeed, some of our wonderful Georgian and Victorian terraces are high density. The problem is that planning for an estate can be decided on its overall density, so it has large executive homes at one end and shoeboxes at the other. A blanket approach to density can skew a development and be very unfortunate for those people who are put into the small amount of housing that is designated as affordable.
	The role of the local planning authority, along with the democratically elected councillors who make up the local planning committees, could be marginalised or made irrelevant by certain aspects of the Bill. If the HCA becomes a local planning authority as outlined in clause 14(2)(b), the role of the true local authority will be neutered. I cannot imagine that my constituents would be happy with the thought that the HCA were in control, rather than democratically elected councillors.
	Clause 8 provides that the HCA may acquire, manage, reclaim, repair, improve and dispose of housing. My concern is that that is a duplication of responsibilities under the empty dwelling management orders for local authorities. If the HCA is to go ahead, the EDMOs should be part of its responsibilities, to avoid duplication. I would like to hear the Minister's view on that point.
	Clause 9 includes worrying provisions about the HCA's power to acquire land compulsorily, including allotments, commons, village greens, open spaces and public gardens. I checked with the lawyers on the Bill Committee the wording of subsection (5), which states:
	"The power...to acquire land compulsorily includes the power to acquire land compulsorily for the giving in exchange for the land".
	The information I received today suggests that the HCA will be able to acquire compulsorily land such as a common or village green and designate a piece of land elsewhere with similar rights. How will the community that has the rights over the original village green or common have any say over the land that is given in exchange? Such pieces of land are often at the heart of our most beautiful villages and can be integral to village life and community activities. If we truly value communities, it must be a worrying notion that a piece of land used for community amenity can be swapped for a piece of land elsewhere.
	That provision, and the replacement of the local planning authority, will mean that local people can be dictated to. Commons, such as the one in Colney Heath, are a valuable environmental resource, contain sensitive habitats and often define villages. If the HCA can compulsorily purchase them for development, what say would local people have if they lost commoners rights? Common land status is not only defined by greenery: some of our historic market towns contain tranches of common land, where commoners' land rights exist over hard landscape. When I was a councillor, I served on an old town regeneration scheme and we discovered that odd tracts of land in the village bore common land rights. Over the years, it had evolved from hard-standing for animals and carts into small car parks or marketplaces. If such common land is to be developed, we need to ensure that common land rights are not extinguished, but they would be very hard to duplicate elsewhere.
	I am sure that the Minister will be as well versed as she needs to be on the subject of fuel allotments, which could also be exchanged or moved elsewhere under the Bill. I was bemused as to what a fuel allotment was until I read "A History of Clewer" today—if the Minister has not done so, I recommend it. A fuel allotment, which can be exchanged, sold or used for development, was established under an Act of George III in 1813 for vesting parts of Windsor forest and gave people foresters rights, including the right to collect fuel. I fail to see how a fuel allotment area—possibly an old piece of land with historic rights over it—could easily be replaced by another piece of land elsewhere. I look forward to examining in Committee how fuel allotments will be dealt with. Those details call for extremely close scrutiny.
	Similarly, I am concerned that clauses 16, 17 and 21 of the Bill may neuter the role of the local highways authority. They allow private roads to be adopted, made into public highways or, sometimes, opened up. That could have far-reaching implications for residents who enjoy a private, semi-rural highway that is not laid to tarmac or, at the other end of the spectrum, those who live in the traffic-averse, gated environments that can be found on some of the newer estates. I understand that residents can appeal against compulsory adoption, but at what cost and on what planning grounds? Surely, any alteration to our highways would need new planning guidance for highways.
	I also want to touch on the certificates of energy sustainability, and those who assess them. We are asked to accept that the new inspection regime will have 890 assessors in place by 2008, and I presume that we are meant to feel comfortable that they will be fully trained and in place by the right date. However, given the Government's handling of the roll-out of the home information packs, and especially their failure to bring forward enough suitably qualified energy assessors, I am sure that other hon. Members will share my scepticism that the plan will fall into place in a timely manner.
	For example, in March 2006 we were assured that between 5,000 and 7,400 full-time home inspectors would be required yet, by May 2007, the Secretary of State was compelled to announce to the House that the actual figure was far lower. According to a recent BBC report, a lack of work and inflated expectations of earning power had left qualified assessors deeply disappointed with their role. Will the new assessors in training for the energy certification job be able to look forward to far more security?
	We need honesty and transparency in the energy certification process, as otherwise we risk a rerun of the HIPs debacle. I am concerned that there will be a degree of duplication and overlap with the energy assessors already in training. That needs to be looked at carefully, as we do not want the Bill to leave us with yet more duplication.
	We have heard a great deal today about sustainable communities, homes and towns. Although a house must be eco-friendly when it is built, we must also ensure that similar consideration is given to the resources used to build it and to the labour force that put it together, as well as to other aspects of construction. The people who buy the homes will want to know whether servicing them will require lots of workmen migrating in and out. In my constituency, for example, there is widespread concern about a contemplated rail freight interchange. That would not be sustainable, as all the labour force required to service it would have to be brought in.
	There are many problems with the Bill that will have to be ironed out in Committee. My constituents are lucky enough to have precious green spaces in their communities, but their biggest worry—which I share—is that the Government will shoehorn even more development into them. I hope that the Minister will be able to give me some comfort about that; if not, I hope that the matter, which many people regard as crucial, is explored fully in Committee.

Julie Morgan: The Bill proposes the same restrictions as apply to other mobile homes, but I agree that such matters need to be considered in detail.
	The present lack of security of tenure means that site residents can be evicted even when they have done nothing wrong. The Caravan Sites Act 1968 provides that, to gain possession of a pitch on a Gypsy site, a local authority need only provide 28 days' notice of termination of a Gypsy's or Traveller's licence, after which it can obtain a possession order from the court. However, resident Gypsies and Travellers have no opportunity to put forward any defence against such an order and thereby to prevent their eviction.
	In May 2004, the European Court of Human Rights decided the case Connors v. United Kingdom, in which the claimant had been evicted from an official local authority Gypsy site on which she had lived for many years. The ECHR decided that the lack of any procedural safeguard was a clear breach of the occupant's rights under article 8 of the European convention on human rights, which provides a right to respect for a person's home, private life and family life.
	An amendment to the Housing Act 2004 gave judges the discretionary power to suspend possession orders, but it did not address or remedy the incompatibility found by the ECHR in the case to which I referred. That point was also made by the Joint Committee on Human Rights in its thirteenth report.
	In November 2004, the Government sent a memorandum to the Council of Ministers indicating that they accepted that security of tenure would have to be introduced on local authority sites for Gypsies and Travellers. The delay in introducing that led me, in July 2006, to sponsor the Caravan Sites (Security of Tenure) Bill. Clause 272 of the Bill under discussion today provides most of what the earlier Bill sought to introduce, but I remain concerned about Gypsy and Traveller families currently facing eviction from local authority sites. They are not protected at the moment, and that is causing them a great deal of stress and difficulty.
	I understand from the Minister that local authority Gypsy and Traveller sites will not constitute social housing under this Bill. I hope that the Government will reconsider that, and ensure that such sites fall under the authority of the social housing regulator. I welcome the fact that the regulator's objectives ensure that
	"actual and potential tenants of social housing have an appropriate degree of...choice, and...protection",
	and that they
	"have the opportunity to be involved in its management."
	Placing Gypsy and Traveller sites under the authority of the social housing regulator would fit in with the Government's planning policy statements on housing. Paragraph 37 of the document published by the Department for Communities and Local Government in May and entitled "Local Authorities and Gypsies and Travellers: A Guide to Responsibilities and Powers" states:
	"Gypsy and Traveller sites are considered as affordable housing where they are owned and managed by a local authority or Registered Social Landlord."
	Considering Gypsy and Traveller sites to be a form of social housing would help to mainstream provision, and could therefore contribute to the creation of the mixed communities that are part of the aim of the Bill.
	If local authority-run Gypsy and Traveller sites were to constitute social housing, as defined by the Bill, the social housing regulator's objectives would cover most of the matters that are included in the Caravan Sites (Security of Tenure) Bill but which are not covered by clause 272 of this Bill.
	My main purpose in focusing briefly on clause 272 is to welcome it and to tell the House what a difference it will make to the lives of so many people. The provision will not give residents of local authority Gypsy and Traveller sites special rights; it will simply give them the same rights as other residents of caravans or mobile homes. The disparity until now has been grossly unfair.
	The clause will not prevent residents who break the conditions of their secure tenancy from being evicted. It will mean that, like tenants of other forms of accommodation, they cannot be evicted without good reason and without proof of an infraction of the rules. It is important that they have the same opportunities as other site residents.
	The clause will not give security of tenure to anyone on an unauthorised encampment or development. The grave shortage of legal sites, which forces about a quarter of Gypsies and Travellers in caravans to park illegally, is addressed by the implementation of other legislation. I hope very much that local authorities will provide sufficient sites for those who need them, but it is too soon to say how successful that legislation will be.
	Clause 272 will undo a serious injustice that has afflicted Gypsies and Travellers for too long. I am pleased that the Government have finally recognised that, and that they are implementing such an important clause. I hope the provision will be taken up by the Welsh Assembly and that it will apply to Gypsies and Travellers living in Wales.
	A decent home is one of the most important things for all of us. One section of the population has suffered badly in that regard and I am pleased that the Government are addressing the problem.

Richard Younger-Ross: Vinyl is making a comeback.
	There is more need for space, so we should not have abolished Parker Morris; we should have revised the standards to take account of the fact that houses need to be bigger to meet the expectations of the modern family. We need the 3 million homes the Minister has proposed to be well designed. Homes and estates should certainly be sustainable but they must also be well designed.
	We need to make sure that houses are big enough. There must be a good mix and diversity within an area to provide a humane environment. During the 1960s, we ignored the fact that people need defensible space. They need that space so that they can flourish on their estates and not feel hemmed in. Young people need to be able to let off steam occasionally, but without every other member of the household doing the same thing because they are all bottled up together in a confined space.
	My second point about healthy housing relates to diversity of housing type. I said earlier that I worked in architecture. I do not know whether I should confess that I used to design houses; perhaps I should confess that a lot of the buildings that were knocked down because they were badly designed were ones I worked on during the '70s—probably a good job, too, in many cases. I would be the first to accept that.  [ Interruption. ] Conservative Members shake their heads, but I did what I was paid to do. My first job as a young technician was designing clothes racks for the balconies of tower blocks. The buildings may still be standing, but they were appalling pieces of design and should never have been built.
	The hon. Member for Cardiff, North (Julie Morgan) referred to Gypsies. I want to talk about another group of caravan residents—those in park homes. We were homeless at one point and I lived in a caravan for seven years, although at only 22 ft by 7 ft my caravan was rather different to modern park homes. During the passage of the Housing Bill in 2004, the Minister considered proposals for legislation on park homes made by the all-party park home owners group. She accepted that there was a need for it and brought in some much-needed legislation. We desperately need more legislation to control bad park home owners. There is an appalling situation in a park home site in my constituency. The residents are elderly, and they are stressed because they feel they are being bullied and that the site owner is trying to get them off the site.
	I ask for a Minister to visit some of the park home sites around the country. They should not write in advance to say they are coming, because then everything will be done to clean the place up first. The visits should be impromptu. I—and, I am sure, other members of the all-party group on park home owners—will facilitate them; I am happy for the Minister to visit the site in my constituency. Ministers should take a look at the conditions that we expect some people to live in.
	Park homes might be moved because they are too close together; they might be less far apart than the required 6 m interval. Teignbridge district council, for instance, decided to enforce the relevant legislation. Let us consider what can happen when a park home is moved. Those who move it destroy the residents' garden. They move the home a couple of feet, and in doing so they knock down the porch. They do not reconstruct the porch for the residents. They do not rebuild the garden for them. They do not in some cases even immediately put steps in place so the residents can get up to their front door. I have seen park homes with temporary building blocks left in place instead, and with no handrail so elderly people have to stagger up them to get through the door. Because of the condition the site is left in, when it rains a torrent of mud might run down through the site. The roads are potholed. The lighting is inadequate. When the site owners have moved someone off, they will leave the electricity box broken and exposed. The residents are elderly people who want their family to visit, but they do not want to let a young child wander around a site that is in such a state—they would not do that because they care for their grandchildren's safety. They are cut off because they do not feel they can allow their family to visit them as where they live is not safe.
	People such as Mr. Small who runs Buckland orchard can run a site in such a way, however, and the local authority says there is little it can do. I ask the Minister please to do something to help those people. They are relying on the Minister. The Government have the opportunity to accept amendments to the Bill that will deal with such situations. In a previous Bill, the Government brought in a fit and proper person requirement for owners and landlords of housing in multiple occupation. I ask them to look into adding such an amendment to this Bill.

Michael Meacher: I welcome the Bill as being the first serious attempt for perhaps three decades to seek to address the issues of severe housing shortage and unaffordability. The Conservative spokesman, the hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps), tried—rather synthetically, I thought—to counter the Bill, and in doing so made one of the thinnest speeches I have heard for a long time from the Opposition Front Bench. The Bill is a major step forward, and he would be wise to recognise that, although I would be the first to agree with other Members that some aspects of it need further consideration, and I want to concentrate on some of them.
	The first is the scale of new house building in relation to need—the Conservative spokesman refused on more than half a dozen occasions to comment on that. The number is still distinctly short of what is required. For more than a quarter of a century, public housing in this country has been starved of investment. It has plummeted from 6.1 per cent. of Government spend per year in 1981—the trend started under Mrs. Thatcher's Government—to just 1.6 per cent. in 2005. That is a staggering drop. If we put it in current price terms—which is the way to make sense of it—the Government today are spending about £22 billion less a year on public housing than their predecessors were at the end of the 1970s.
	We should add to that the fact that half the public stock has been removed by sales and transfers of various kinds. The council waiting list was 1.6 million two years ago, and it is probably higher today, and it is now virtually impossible to get a council tenancy at all in current conditions. The situation in my town, Oldham, is similar to that in many other Members' areas; in Oldham, the waiting list is now 11,000 and the total number of council properties remaining after all the sales is only 12,000 or 13,000. Even if someone is lucky enough to get a council tenancy, the rent-setting formula has now been changed from pooled-historical rent to one that is partly related to owner-occupied housing in the area. Therefore, just as house prices have risen dramatically, rents have also risen sharply, sometimes so much that they are out of financial reach.
	As Members have also said, no one today has got a conceivable hope of buying their way out into the private sector as almost everywhere in the country the ratio of mortgage loans to income is now 5:1 or 6:1, and in some places even 8:1 or 10:1. Nor is it clear—I find this very worrying—that a small increase in housing will necessarily stabilise, let alone bring down, housing prices in view of the fact that the flow of house-purchase lending, which is now at the staggering level of £1 trillion a year, is rising so much faster. If extra house building increases the stock by, let us say, 1 or 2 per cent. a year, which might well be an effect of this Bill, while at the same time the credit available to buy it is rising at 5 per cent. or even more a year, house prices can hardly be expected to fall.
	I admire the aspirations of the Bill but I do not think it is ambitious enough. I think that what is needed is a return nearer to historical levels of housing investment and a major construction drive targeted at good-quality council housing made available at construction-cost-related rents and entirely unrelated to the ballooning prices in the private sector. Although the Government's proposals for increased house building are very welcome, I fear that they fall well short of matching the demand. The Government are proposing 200,000 new homes a year to 2016, and 240,000 new homes a year by 2020, but the housing economist with the best reputation in this area, Alan Holman, has estimated the required new housing formation every year at about 220,000 and that the extent of unmet housing need that has accumulated over the years—due to overcrowding, for example, and bad-quality, damp housing—is probably another half a million homes. If that latter category were to be cleared in a 10-year housing programme—which, I think, is modest—that would require 270,000 houses a year, which is considerably more than the Government's aim.

Mark Pritchard: I do not wish to embarrass the right hon. Gentleman as a former Environment Minister, but is it not the case that much of the increased housing numbers he seeks could be found by local authorities doing far more to deal with their voids—with their empty properties—and by their releasing them back into the rented sector? The fact is that some of the worst offenders in terms of not releasing such voids are Labour authorities.  [Interruption.] Yes, they are.

Emily Thornberry: I have been advised that I should declare an interest before participating in the debate. I refer hon. Members to the Register of Members' Interests. When my brothers and I left home my mum was living on her own in a three-bedroom council house, so I helped her to buy a flat. The house was therefore released back to the council so that another family could live in it. When my brother resettled in England after working for nearly 20 years in central Africa as an aid worker, I gave him the money for the deposit on his one-bedroom flat. My husband owns a house that is rented out to some young people whom we know, who are on low incomes.
	Until I was elected, I had no particular interest in housing, except perhaps from my own experience of how desperately we need to provide social housing. When I was seven, the bailiffs came. I remember that they wore bowler hats and they chucked us out of our house. We had nowhere to go. Thankfully, we were given a council house. I do not know what would have happened to us otherwise. I hate to think.
	I now represent an area which has one of the worst housing crises in the country, and for me housing has become a passion. I do what I can. Sometimes it is hard, and I am willing to admit that some of my housing cases keep me awake at night because sometimes all I can give my constituents is tissues.
	Last month a woman came to see me. I shall call her Jackie. She has two little children. She was going to be evicted the next week. The rent that she had to pay on her flat was far too much. She could not possibly afford it so she had got behind, and was about to become intentionally homeless, so Islington council had no obligation to rehouse her and would not do so. She was desperate to stay in the borough where her children were at school, but she has had to move many miles away to a private rented flat. I could not help her and her family get affordable housing in Islington.
	I cannot say that that is the hardest case that I have had to deal with, but I raise it now because it reminded me so much of the situation that my mother was in 40 years go. The position has not got any better over 40 years. The overcrowding is worse and homeless families continue to face terrible crises. In Islington there are 13,000 families waiting for housing. Two thirds of those are living in overcrowded conditions. It is estimated that in the next two years 7,000 more households will be created, but the houses will not be built. Islington's housing crisis is desperate. The market cannot and will not provide.
	The median income in Islington is about £25,000 a year. The entry level price for a two-bedroom flat is about £300,000, which is 12 times the median income. In this week's paper, the cheapest one-bedroom flat, an ex-council flat, is £250,000. That is 10 times the median income. What about the private sector and private rented homes? Unfortunately, there is nothing there approaching an affordable rent. The cheapest one- bedroom flat in this week's local paper is £210 a week. The person on a median income, £25,000, is taking home £320 a week, so paying £210 in rent leaves only £110 for food, bills, travel, council tax and so on.
	Our median person, one of the 7,000 new households, cannot rent or buy in Islington. What will happen to them? Many of my constituents are poorer than the median person. The average household income of people on council estates in my constituency is £15,000 a year, and nearly half of my constituents live in social housing. Many of those households include children.
	That brings us back to social housing and the 13,000 families on the council waiting list. Allocations are managed by a system that is laughingly called choice-based lettings. There is no choice and there are hardly any lettings. Only those in the top half of the waiting list are even allowed to bid for properties. The bottom half, 6,500 families, have to hang on until things get better, and they are not getting better.
	Perhaps the Opposition Members, none of whom are still in the Chamber, who campaigned so actively to ensure that we do not build any more affordable homes would like to guess where the woman whom I am about to describe is on the waiting list. She came to see me a year ago. She is a single mother with one child. She is homeless through no fault of her own and is living in a hostel provided by the council. Let us call her Fatima. She has one room in the hostel. That is no place to bring up a child. Hostels should be for emergencies.
	Where is Fatima in the list of 13,000—in the top 1,000, who might have a chance of getting a home in the next year? No, because she is not seriously ill and nor is her child. Is she in the top 2,000, who could reasonably expect to be rehoused in the next two years? No. Fatima is in the bottom 6,500—those who have no chance of ever getting an affordable house in Islington. She came to see me again in my surgery recently. She still does not have enough points to bid for a home, so she is stuck in the hostel with a larger toddler now. She is on income support. Should she go to a one- bedroom flat in the private market at £210 a week? What would happen if she got a job? How would she feed herself and her child? Surely it makes sense for us to build enough affordable housing for rent so that my constituent has a chance of a home for herself and her child.
	My Lib Dem Islington council's record on the matter is a disgrace. Councillors must be disconnected from real life in Islington. I cannot believe that they are intrinsically evil or wicked people, but they do not seem to understand the crisis. They will not stand up to developers and they will not refuse planning permission unless half of it is affordable housing that my Islington families can afford. Instead, only one in seven of all new homes that are being built in Islington is affordable rented housing. It is not good enough. I am pleased that the Government will step in.

Emily Thornberry: I do not know, off the top of my head.  [Interruption.] I am being prompted by one of my hon. Friends but I do not know.
	People buy up council housing and rent it out at extraordinarily high prices as temporary accommodation. We are expected to foot the bill by way of housing benefit. That is how people get caught in a poverty trap and we must do something about it. The only solution in the end is to build more. In Islington, where land prices are so high, the council could take advantage of that and say to developers, "You can't build here unless half of what you build is for local people. You can make your great big profits on the other half." That takes backbone, which my Liberal council does not have, and it ought to.

Brian Iddon: In the north-west over the past decade the housing scene in our large cities and towns has changed from one of low demand, and even of abandonment in our older terraced streets, to one of affordability. Affordability is not only a matter for London, the south-east, York and Chester, because it hits all our areas today, including my town of Bolton.
	Regeneration has been one of this Government's successes—if hon. Members visit Manchester today, they will see all the cranes on the skyline—and it has extended to housing in our older urban areas. Whereas once we had street after street of decaying and deeply unpopular terraced housing stock from the factory eras blighting the lives of the people who lived there, today we have a new hope in most of those areas. I urge the Government not to take their foot off the accelerator of regeneration, especially in the pathfinder areas of the north-west.
	Our region still faces the greatest incidence of low-quality private sector housing in the entire country. We need to invest both in providing new homes to meet increasing demand, which is partly driven by substantial demographic changes, and in valuing our existing stock, which needs the refurbishment that this Bill will hopefully provide.
	As economic growth accompanies urban regeneration, people are—fortunately—being attracted back to live in our town centres. Town centre living has been positively encouraged in Bolton, where we have built on brownfield sites, such as the recent use of an old picture house, and converted old mills and churches into affordable accommodation for purchase. However, the speculators have moved in, too, and we have our fair share of buy-not-to-let properties in Bolton. Cities such as Leeds and Salford report that between 40 and 50 per cent. of new private sector flats in the city centre are empty, which is a scandal considering what we have heard this afternoon. The Government must try to tackle that. Are we building for sale far too many one and two-bedroomed flats, rather than much-needed family accommodation?
	Rising prices have restored confidence in recent years in the older end of the private sector market. Young people are now buying in areas that they would not have considered 10 years ago, and they are spending money on refurbishing homes at the cheaper end of the market.
	I joined Bolton's housing committee in 1977, and after that we rightly abandoned general improvement areas, which were vehicles for tarting up run-down areas. Instead, housing action areas were introduced under the Tory Government, which were a way of not only substantially improving older properties, but investing in the surrounding environment. Our first HAA was declared in the Castle street area in my constituency in 1977. We promised the residents a further 30 years of life for their properties, and it is ironic that we are having this debate 30 years later. Those properties in Castle street, and many thousands more throughout Bolton that were refurbished after that under the HAA, must last for many more years given the current rate of regeneration. My fear is that if we do not tackle that problem large clearance areas will reappear at some point.
	I am in favour of limited clearance, but not on the scale at which we used to do it in Bolton in the '60s and early '70s, when 1,000 properties were cleared every year. We must slowly regenerate our towns by replacing some of the clapped-out houses, otherwise we will face the major clearance problem that I have mentioned. Although Bolton has supported the need for housing market renewal, which is clearly demonstrated by those areas chosen as pathfinders, it has meant a considerable slowing down of the regeneration of older properties in Bolton and throughout the north-west. The danger is that we will return to a point at which private sector housing falls into disrepair faster than we can improve it.
	I welcome the formation of the Homes and Communities Agency under the Bill. Its focus will be on regeneration as well as the provision of more rented social housing. The Government have some tough challenges to face, but I hope that they will commit themselves to meeting those challenges.
	In the north-west, house price rises far outstrip wage and salary growth, and there is an urgent need to develop a higher-wage economy in our region. In 2002, only four districts in the north-west were experiencing lower quartile house prices to lower quartile earnings affordability ratios of above five, but by 2006 only eight districts had a lower ratio, and a significant number had a ratio in excess of six. Those facts, along with the sub-prime crash in the United States, are having an increasingly serious effect on the British housing market as credit becomes harder to acquire, which is making buying a home much more difficult today.
	I have been worried for some time that if the economy slows, stagnates or crashes—I hope that that does not happen—there will be nowhere to house those people who lose their owner-occupied houses. In my opinion, we have concentrated too much on home ownership, which is currently far too high at over 70 per cent. I ask Ministers how much further we can go beyond 70 per cent. Of course, it is most people's ambition to own their own home, but the problem is that many of those who have been persuaded or even cajoled into buying their own home can no longer afford to maintain it. Today, for example, I visited a refurbished council estate, where it was easy to pick out the houses that had been bought in previous years, because they desperately need refurbishment.
	There is a desperate need for more affordable rented accommodation in the private and the public sectors: both have a role to play. The problem is that one third of our former council homes have been sold off through the right-to-buy policy. There is not much point in building more affordable rented homes if the right to buy will be applicable to them. Shelter shares my concern about that. I urge my hon. Friend the Minister to find a way of protecting such homes from sale in the future.
	We need to replace those lost affordable rented homes as quickly as possible, as the housing market again changes rapidly. It is noticeable that the turnover of council properties has slowed down significantly and that, as a result, waiting lists have risen—in Bolton, from about 5,000 in 1997 to more than 18,000 today. That figure is very up to date, because we have just cleared out the dead wood in the waiting list by writing to everybody. It is a joint waiting list held between the council and all the housing associations in the town. Like Shelter and many Members who have spoken, I am completely opposed to the application of a means test for social rented housing. Social housing should not become residual housing only for the very poor. In 1997, the new Labour Government faced a backlog of £19 billion-worth of repairs of the council-owned stock caused by 18 years of gross neglect of that stock by the Tory Government. In the 10 years when I was chairman of housing in Bolton, from 1986 to 1996, I lost 70 per cent. of housing investment in our town. Is it any wonder that we face this crisis today?
	The decent homes standard will be met in Bolton by 2010, and Bolton Homesforyou, the arm's length management organisation that manages the stock, has gone well beyond the standards laid down by the Government. I am pleased to announce to the Minister that the SAP—standard assessment procedure—ratings on Bolton's refurbished ALMO-managed properties averages 72 per cent., which is exceptional.
	Today, 27 November, is Lancashire day, when, in 1295, the first elected representatives from Lancashire were summoned to Westminster by King Edward I to attend what became known as the Model Parliament. It has been a particular pleasure for me to take part in this debate, because although I live in Bolton I regard myself as a Lancastrian.

Lyn Brown: It is not similar, in the main. However, I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her speech, because it put a human face on many of the difficulties that my constituents experience.
	In Newham, 30,000 people are on the housing waiting list. To give some perspective, that number is roughly equivalent to the population of Pontefract, which is of course represented by my right hon. Friend the Minister for Housing. Tenants living in the private rented sector, waiting for a council home, pay in excess of £1,000 per calendar month for often cramped two-bedroomed flats sitting over parades of shops. Even after the introduction of the minimum wage and support to families through tax credits, the vast majority of Members will recognise just how difficult it must be for families with high rents of that nature who wish to keep a roof over their heads and to work. My constituents also have to contend with the evils bedevilling overcrowded households. According to the 2001 census, more than a quarter of households in Newham were classified as overcrowded under the current definition, which, as we have heard, is not generous. Newham also has the highest proportion in the UK of households with five or more residents. This intense pressure on housing in Newham is exacerbated by the fact that the supply of new properties is not meeting local demand. During the summer of 2006, only 6 per cent. of the homes being developed in the borough were three-bedroomed properties, whereas 65 per cent. were two-bedroomed. Smaller properties are clearly a much more attractive option for investors, but they will not ease the immense pressure upon homes appropriate for families. The draft London housing strategy proposes that 42 per cent. of new social rented homes entering the programme should have three or more bedrooms. Does the Bill give the Minister the power to intervene if, once these targets are set, they are not being met?
	As part of the developments planned for my area, including the Olympics and Stratford city, thousands of new homes are being developed; obviously, I welcome that. The intention is to ensure that all developments are mixed communities, with properties built for the social and private housing sectors. I genuinely believe that mixed communities are absolutely the right policy. However, building for the private sector is not a guarantee of mixed communities or a guarantee that it will provide for owner-occupation.
	That is the crux of the problem. Forty-five per cent. of new homes in London are bought to let. A far greater proportion are bought to let in areas where property is cheaper; and, in comparison with many parts of London, Newham is cheaper. Official London borough of Newham statistics state that of the 950 new homes completed in 2005-06, only 132 were for social rented accommodation. Because of difficulties in data collection, Newham was unable to say how many of the private homes were for buy-to-let and how many for owner-occupation. Unfortunately, I have no doubt that much of this new private accommodation will have been bought for the letting market, bringing even more accommodation into the unaffordable private lettings sector in my borough. Given that we have nearly 6,000 families in temporary accommodation and 30,000 families on the waiting list, I wonder whether it is possible to consider how we might regulate the housing market to limit the numbers of buy-to-lets in any given locality, according to circumstance.

David Taylor: In light of the circumstances that my hon. Friend describes, is she concerned or alarmed that the Bill envisages social housing grant, which is after all public money, being given to profit-making companies with almost no protection for tenants or taxpayers, when the same resources are being denied to good local authorities and their existing stock is being coerced away from them through pressured tenants' ballots? That is rather an odd mix, is it not?

Lyn Brown: I agree with my hon. Friend. I want more affordable housing in the public sector that owner-occupiers in Newham can afford to access.
	Without regulation of the private letting market, I fear that new build in the private sector will only exacerbate an already difficult situation, resulting in the continued accumulation of unaffordable homes. Such regulation is not completely unprecedented. Planning permission in the Lake District national park determines the number and growth of holiday-let businesses in the area, with certain homes being designated for local occupancy only. I do not wish to draw an exact parallel, or say that this legislation can be easily brought to bear elsewhere in the country, but I ask the Secretary of State to give some thought as to how homes built under our house-building programme can be targeted at those whom the scheme is meant to target and benefit—those with an aspiration to own and live in their own home, and those with public sector housing needs.
	I do not ask that for social or ideological reasons alone, but for sound financial reasons, too. Housing benefit spending in my borough is £245 million per year. A third of that—£67 million—is spent on paying private landlords. The average amount of housing benefit paid to council tenants in Newham is £70 a week. The average payment for housing benefit in temporary accommodation is £350 a week—five times the housing benefit paid to council tenants. I seek additional regulation of the private rented sector, and I wonder whether the miscellaneous provisions of the Bill could be amended to accommodate that.
	I am situated in the borough with the largest building site in Europe. If it is not, I cannot imagine anywhere else with more building going on. We have a population of migrant workers who almost uniformly find accommodation in the private rented sector, which in Newham consists largely of small terraced properties. Overcrowding in those homes is almost de rigueur. Landlords can and do make a killing, packing those homes with temporary residents. As the homes are too small to accommodate the number of people, many facets of living often overflow into the street and garden, which can lead to significant health problems. Such exceptionally high levels of occupancy are causing real stress in local communities and the local council does not have the powers to do anything about it.
	I have discussed that issue with many of my constituents, who tell me that they will sell and move if the situation does not improve. That would be bad enough, but their homes are more likely than not to be bought to let, thus exacerbating an already difficult situation. That owner-occupier flight, if it continues at the present rate, could seriously jeopardise our efforts to create and sustain mixed, sustainable and cohesive communities in Newham. There are currently no real powers to deal with this problem. Under the Housing Act 2004, there is a mandatory licensing scheme for larger houses in multiple occupation.
	Currently, the mandatory licensing scheme covers only homes with three or more storeys. The regime does not cover 80 per cent. of houses in multiple occupation, including the vast majority of those in my constituency. Having discussed that, though briefly, with the mayor of my borough, I understand that he would not welcome additional powers unless they were accompanied by severe penalties. The financial reward for cramming small houses with large numbers of people is so great, that paltry fines do nothing to deter the practice; rather, they reinforce contempt for the law and those who seek to enforce it. I hope that the Minister will consider extending the threshold down to all houses of five or more occupants, and ensure that penalties are severe enough to act as a real deterrent.
	I welcome measures to increase the regulation of social housing landlords, adding vital additional protections for tenants of housing associations. As I know from listening to my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry), I am not the only MP who gets frustrated by the lack of responsiveness to constituents' needs on the part of some housing associations. I am sure that the Office for Tenants and Social Landlords will allow tenants far greater opportunities to hold their landlords to account and encourage them to up their game. I hope that the Minister ensures that the new office has real teeth and the ability to penalise or break up associations if they are considered to be completely unresponsive to the needs of their tenants, or to be too large and unwieldy.
	Finally, English Partnerships has been a key player in the regeneration of east London. It has demonstrated the capacity to turn unloved wastelands into attractive developments for people who wish to buy on the riverside. However, it has not always developed the social rented homes that my constituents desperately need. The Housing Corporation used to be criticised for what was seen as a rather cold and unsympathetic attitude—an assessment that was always a little unfair. However, in recent years we have seen a new mentality take hold within the corporation that is focused more on the homeless people and overcrowded families who desperately need the homes that it funds. Bringing the two agencies together is a logical move, but my final plea to the Minister is that when the time comes for the merger, the ethos of the Housing Corporation should prevail.
	In conclusion, I believe that the Bill can significantly improve the circumstances of many in my constituency. However, the Government's efforts must surely focus on providing the homes that are needed most, to those that need them most. In West Ham, that means providing affordable family homes, for rent and owner-occupation.

Austin Mitchell: My speech follows a succession of very good and powerful speeches on this side of the House, all of which have drawn attention to the problems that have arisen from 30 years of disinvestment in social and council housing, and from 10 years of low build levels of social housing. The inevitable consequences that follow—the powerful and terrible effects on people—featured in the brilliant speeches that we heard from Islington and West Ham.
	The only answer is a bigger build programme. Fortunately, we are now getting that—belatedly perhaps—from the Government. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, West and Royton (Mr. Meacher) said, perhaps the build programme is not big enough. The Cambridge study certainly indicated that it needs to be bigger, but at least we are starting along the road. However, I want to emphasise the question whether we are doing enough to regenerate existing council estates and to improve the situation that they have been put into by right to buy. This is a regeneration Bill as well as a housing one, and I want to emphasise that point.
	I should begin with the inevitable mantra of welcoming the Bill. I have to say, in welcoming it, that I have some reservations. First, I cannot accept the introduction of a means test for housing. We would be saying that low-cost rental housing is for people who cannot afford to buy or rent at market rates. That means a means test, which is unacceptable to the Labour party or, I think, the people. A basic principle of Labour policy on council and social housing will be revoked by the clause in question. I do not know why it is there; I hope that the Minister will explain it to us. It should not be there, and we should not have any truck with such a policy. A means test for admission would mean that low-cost housing becomes a transit camp, not a permanent settled place of residence where people can build communities and settle their lives. They would have to be moved out when they reached a certain level, just as they had moved in because they had sunk to a certain level.
	Secondly, I am concerned that the local authorities, which must drive local housing developments because they know the needs of the people in the area and see what the problems are, are not in the central position that they should be. In fact, we are giving more power to the private sector by allowing private builders to register as social landlords, and by allowing registered social landlords to turn themselves into limited companies driven by a profit motive. Those seem to be retrograde steps and the emphasis should be on the councils. However, the impact assessment for the Bill says that the provisions for allowing them to build will allow the building of only 2,500 houses. That is after 300 houses had been sold in the last year.
	Councils' first choice is to build 2,500 out of their own resources. If they do not do that, they must register—there is a procedure for examination and ratification—as ALMOs or special purpose vehicles. That will give them access to social housing grants. However, they will compete with the private sector and RSLs for limited funds. The Bill will therefore not put local authorities in the strong position that they should occupy. Local authorities should be the main providers of social housing. A much higher proportion of the housing that we build must be public housing for rent and the best way to provide that is through councils.
	I am worried that that discrimination against councils is carried through to the local housing companies, of which there are 15. Councils are asked to give up land to the private sector and private developers.

David Taylor: Is my hon. Friend as surprised as I am by the proposal to give the new regulator powers to transfer compulsorily management or even ownership of council housing without consulting all the tenants, without a tenants' ballot and without the express permission of the Secretary of State? Is that not going too far?

Austin Mitchell: I am not surprised, but amazed that that is happening. There is no reason for it.
	However, my main argument is that we should not continue the campaign of cajoling and bullying councils into privatisation. At least the ballots should be better regulated because most of them are an affront to democracy. The Department accepted a rerun of a ballot in Sefton—as if Sefton were Denmark—which produced a different verdict with a lower poll. I am amazed that the Government do not take the opportunity to tighten up such matters. The campaign to privatise weakens councils when we need to mobilise their energies and concern for housing to get behind the building drive.
	The three faults that I have outlined are basic. The Bill's big idea is a new super-quango, constructed by merging the Housing Corporation and English Partnerships. That may produce a new synergy, but it will not do it quickly because such mergers take much time, create many difficulties and can be destabilising. Their consequences can also be messy.
	The housing crisis is happening now. I put it to the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Hartlepool (Mr. Wright), that the sort of discontent that housing and transport problems generated and that helped damage the Labour party in the south-east in 2005 will be much worse at the next election. We need the house-building programme now; we should not wait for a new super-quango to get its act together. The strains will grow—they are increasing all the time, as my hon. Friends the Members for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn) and for West Ham (Lyn Brown) have shown. I am worried about that.
	I am not sure what to make of the ability that the Bill grants to councils to opt out of the housing revenue account. The impact assessment contains an incredible endorsement, which states that the arrangement
	"would not be viable for most councils. This settlement would create an opening debt level within those councils higher than could be supported by their income".
	We offer an opportunity yet tell councils not to accept it. That is crazy. I do not understand it. If councils opt out, it breaks up the housing revenue account, and that will have an adverse effect on those that are left in. The provision is gobbledegook, which does not achieve what the Bill's main purpose should be—to implement the decisions of the Labour party conference. I personally regard those decisions as Labour party policy because the Labour party conference passed them three times, yet the Bill does not implement them.
	The Labour party conference argued for a fourth option, which is a level playing field between housing associations—RSLs—and local authorities and the ability to raise money and to write off historic debt. Why should councils struggle on with historic debt when it is written off—simply as a bookkeeping transaction—for RSLs? Councils should be able to borrow—the Housing Act 2004 allows them to do that. However, the management and maintenance grant that the Department pays them is not adequate. The Government's business research establishment has told them that it is far lower than it should be. If they paid 100 per cent. of the grant that they should pay for management and maintenance, that would provide a revenue stream on which councils could borrow to build, renovate and improve. Why have we not done that?
	We should end the £1.5 billion deduction every year, about which the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Paul Holmes) complained. There is no justification for that deduction. It should be left for local authorities to use for housing. It is a failing not to include in the Bill the intentions—indeed, the principles—that the Labour party conference enunciated and put councils on a level playing field with RSLs.
	I want a return to the mixed communities that council estates were. In 1947, we changed the principle on which council estates were built from accommodation for the working class and manual workers to accommodation for anyone. As Professor Hills's research showed, a substantial proportion of the better-off tenth of society lived on those council estates in 1979. Since then they have become social dumping grounds, and that has broken down all sense of community. We must rebuild that, and that means making council estates mixed communities again, and refurbishing and regenerating them. All that is part of the problem of regeneration, which I hope that we can tackle through the Bill. There are faults in the measure and I look forward to improving it in Committee and on Report.

Andrew Gwynne: I should like to draw hon. Members' attention to my entry in the Register of Members' Interests, as a member until May of one of the housing authorities in my constituency. I am pleased to be called to speak in this debate, which I consider to be vital to many of my constituents and to the people of this country as a whole. It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell) who spoke quite a few words of wisdom—I hope that the Government are in listening mode.
	I welcome the Bill because if we get it right—I believe that the broad thrust is right—we will have a much better situation in respect of housing than we do today. We all know what the problem is, as it has already been mentioned by other speakers. There are just not enough houses to meet the demand out there for people, and families in particular, to be housed. For the past 25 years or more, we have taken our eye off the ball, although we are all to blame in some respect. Now there is a substantial problem in my constituency and, from what we have heard, those of other hon. Members, too.
	Whatever the rights and wrongs of right to buy—I do not intend to go over those today—without building houses to replace those that were sold off, let alone additional houses to meet the growing demand of an expanding and changing population, we have created a severe shortage in socially rented accommodation in parts of the country. That is certainly the case in my constituency, as an average advice bureau in any of the seven venues in the Stockport and Tameside parts of my seat would bear out.
	How did we get where we are today? As we know, not only have local authorities been stripped of their financial ability to build more homes for rent, but they have struggled adequately to maintain the ever-diminishing stock that they managed, to the extent that billions of pounds of repair backlogs built up over the years. The investment made in those houses after 1997, bringing them up to the newly defined decent homes standard, was definitely the right focus for the Government initially. The work done by Irwell Valley housing association and the New Charter housing trust group in Tameside and by Stockport homes in Reddish is a testament to the massive investment in stock renewal that the Government have permitted and pursued.
	New windows, doors, bathrooms and kitchens are fantastic, but only if people have a roof over their heads in the first instance. For too many people coming through the door of my advice bureau, there is no realistic prospect of being offered a home in the socially rented sector in the first place, because there are just not enough to go around. Like other hon. Members, I find it disheartening that, because of how the system works, younger couples—working but on low wages, struggling to do their best and bringing up families—just do not have enough points ever to be allocated anything.
	Those are the very same kinds of families who after the second world war could expect a nice new council house—a semi-detached house, with a front and back garden for the children to play in. That provision was also there, just about, for their children, but sadly not for their grandchildren or their great-grandchildren. The reality today is that some of those young couples are forced to split up because of the lack of any prospect of being housed as a family. Some live in cramped conditions, with a friend or at mum's and dad's house, in the hope that the letter from the housing department offering them a house will come through the letterbox. That is far from ideal, but it is sadly a common occurrence I hear about at my advice surgeries.
	The situation is made worse in that some of those families would previously have had the option of buying a small terraced property, of which there is a plentiful supply throughout my constituency. In the past, such a property was an ideal starter home for those who could just about scrape enough together to cover a small mortgage. However, over the past 10 years the property market in Denton and Reddish has boomed—excellent news for those with their feet already on the property ladder, but not good news for those starting out today.
	The property market in my constituency has seen a 398 per cent. increase in a decade, albeit from a low starting point. The average cost of that small terraced house in Denton and Reddish is now £140,000. Some hon. Members might think, "£140,000? Wow—affordable housing!", but what is affordable to some is out of the price range of others. The average wage of my constituents is £16,800 a year, although for many it is much less than that, placing even terraced housing firmly beyond their reach. So the social rented sector is no longer an option and, for many now, neither is buying. At present, therefore, the only option seems to be the private rented sector.
	Let me put it on record that there are some very good, honest, decent private landlords. I do not wish to tar all private landlords with the same brush. However, in my constituency and elsewhere rogue landlords are operating. They do not care a jot about their tenants or about the conditions in which they are forced to live. I have seen squalid conditions over which the local authority has few powers to intervene.

Andrew Gwynne: I very much agree with my hon. Friend, and I think that that is the way the general public want us to go. People do not want to be seen to be in some kind of stigmatised property. They do not care who owns the bricks and mortar; they want a decent home that would not look out of place on a private estate, and why shouldn't they? It is the job of the planning authorities to ensure that we get good developments.
	As part of meeting that unmet demand, we need more socially rented housing—yes, many thousands more properties. The two councils in my constituency and their partners need to go away and identify possible sites and ensure that they are brought forward for development as soon as possible. That in itself is going to be difficult. Both Stockport and Tameside are pretty high-density boroughs already, and most of the available space is now developed. There may be scope for some infill. I can think of areas such as the ex-Manchester overspill estate in Haughton Green and at Denton's Yew Tree estate where the housing was laid out among some very generous open space provision. There are some significant brownfield sites dotted around both boroughs, which could be brought forward for housing rather than for other uses.
	We also need to look at the problem across the Greater Manchester city region, not just within the constraints of those two boroughs. Yes, Tameside and Stockport must do their bit, but that has to be within the bigger Greater Manchester-wide picture, too. As part of that city region overview, I believe that we also need to be much more imaginative about housing types. I do not want to see a return to monolithic housing estates and the planning mistakes of the 1960s and 1970s, where certainly the numbers of housing units that we would like to see were constructed, but with little thought for human needs. Let us be clear that not everyone will want to rent, so we need to look into shared equity and, for many, we need to explore some new low mortgage options.
	The Government may not be able to deal with all those points as part of the Bill. although I hope they can look at the scope for extending regulation in Committee. If not, I urge them to use whatever means they have at their disposal to ensure that all private landlords, not just those in areas experiencing housing market failure, are licensed and that the decent homes standard is made to apply to all housing for rent, whether it be in the social sector or, most important of all, in the private sector.
	As I said at the start, I broadly welcome the Bill, which has many excellent provisions. The decision to create a Homes and Community Agency is, I think, right. It should ensure not just that the investment is in place to build new houses, but that sufficient land is identified and planning hurdles are easily overcome. The decision to create an Office for Tenants and Social Landlords is also a good move. It should strengthen the regulatory regime and empower tenants in the social rented sector. It should not just apply across the social sector—including ALMOs and councils—but should cover all tenants and all landlords for the reasons I have stated, including the many thousands of my constituents in the private rented sector.
	I hope that these issues will be taken up in more detail by the Minister in Committee. This is a good Bill with good intentions. With a small amount of tweaking, it has the making of a great Bill with great intentions.

Margaret Moran: I, too, believe that this Bill gives us cause for great optimism, notwithstanding the depression that often surrounds the debate because of the circumstances in which our constituents find themselves. I have to say that my optimism was tempered by depression when I heard the opening speech from the Opposition Front Bench. The hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps) claimed that we had refused to learn the lessons of past mistakes. May I say that that is exactly what the Opposition have done? I fail to see how they cannot understand that tackling housing need, particularly that for affordable rented homes, helps to stabilise the housing market, which is good for the stability of the overall economy.
	I had one of those time-warp moments when I was taken back to the real world in which I used to exist before coming into this place. I was chief executive of a small housing association, as we were then called, and I well remember how over-regulated we were. I had to keep filling in five or six of the same forms, giving the same information when I wanted and needed to be out doing deals with private finance institutions to enable me to develop more homes for those in housing need.
	I am pleased to say that this Bill introduces more streamlining of regulation for registered social landlords, which means better value for the housing market, better value for RSLs and, more important, better value for those who need housing, which we should be able to support. I had thought that Opposition Members welcomed more streamlined regulation and the added value that it can bring, but we hear one argument today and another tomorrow.
	I find myself in a time warp, back in the days when I was chair of my housing committee and, latterly, leader of Lewisham council. I well remember the then Tory Government's ideological opposition to the building of any affordable housing for rent, be it local authority or housing association accommodation. I remember the limbo dancing that we had to perform, and the funny-money deals in which we had to engage to secure foreign investment that would enable us to build or renovate housing in Lewisham. I remember, when I led on housing in the Association of Metropolitan Authorities, discussing these issues with Opposition Members—many of whom, sadly, have now left the Chamber—and pleading with them to allow local authorities to invest in not only the provision of desperately needed new homes, but the renovation of properties that remained empty because of their state of disrepair.
	We saw record levels of homelessness. We saw Conservative Ministers walk over the homeless on their way to the opera, and we saw a record number of repossessions because of high interest rates. My constituency of Luton became known as the mortgage misery capital of the country. When I moved to the constituency, I saw house after house that I could not bring myself to buy because the families had fled leaving all their possessions, including the children's toys, and had thrown the keys back through the letter box because of the legacy of the Conservative Government. There was also a huge backlog of council stock repairs, in which, to their credit, this Government have invested massively as part of the decent homes strategy.
	Let us be under no illusion: we are still experiencing the legacy of the Conservative Government. It is not possible to switch housing construction on and off like a tap. The skills and the materials must be there, and all the pieces must be in place. Sadly, Opposition Members do not seem to realise that, but I am pleased to be part of a Government who do.  [Interruption.] Rather than heckling from the Opposition Front Bench, the hon. Member for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant) would do well to listen and learn. We must be able to put all the mechanisms in place before we can deliver our programme of social and rented affordable housing.

Margaret Moran: My hon. Friend has most articulately demonstrated my point: we cannot afford to have Tory-run councils deciding that they will allow people in my constituency to languish in poor and overcrowded housing for eternity. This Bill gives us the opportunity to deal not only with bricks and mortar and the numbers of new homes that are needed, but with the associated infrastructure that is needed.
	I shall make a small plea about a local issue. Can we please have junction 11A of the M1 widened soon? That would enable us not only to develop the growth area rapidly, but to facilitate the relocation of my football club and, by so doing, free up a seriously important piece of land in the centre of town, which would be designated for social housing. The Minister would earn so many brownie points if he were to work with Ministers in other Departments, such as the Department for Transport, to enable that to happen.
	Other issues in the Bill require closer examination. I welcome the new powers for Oftenant—what a dreadful name. As a former insider—as a chief executive of an RSL—I know that too many RSLs are unresponsive to tenants' needs, despite dire conditions on some estates. My constituents in Brook street, including large Bangladeshi families and women on their own, faced conditions including no lighting, no security, and dumped and burned-out cars, but there was no response from the RSL. I had to drag the chief executive of a national RSL to my constituency to get any response. Areas such as Tinsley close have several different RSLs managing property on a small estate, none of which will take responsibility. I welcome the measures in the Bill that will help to address that.
	We need more imaginative solutions than just the bricks and mortar. I welcome the emphasis in the Bill on the need for social and economic regeneration, because that has to underpin our plans. We need to consider community land trusts, which will enable us to retain houses in perpetuity. The community gateway model is about to be implemented on the Downham estate in Lewisham, where I used to live, and it will empower tenants to manage and run their own areas. We have to be open to such innovations if we are to make a substantial difference.
	We also need to ensure that we embrace the regulation of the private rented sector, as well as the public rented sector, to ensure decent standards. In my constituency, the poorest in the community live in the poorest accommodation in the private rented sector. We also need to prevent sales by RSLs, otherwise we will develop properties only to lose them. Finally, I agree with those who propose that we examine the buy-to-leave—not the buy-to-let—that is happening in many areas.

Andrew Slaughter: I welcome the Bill. The Chair of the Select Committee—it seems a long time ago now—noted the breadth of support for it, ranging from the Tory-controlled Local Government Association, the National Housing Federation, Shelter to even the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, which is more used to suing the Government than complimenting them at the moment. That makes one wonder who are the enemies of an increased housing supply and, in particular, social and affordable housing. We have had the answer today from the Opposition Front Bencher, the hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps), and Back Benchers, not to mention in recent times the Tory mayoral candidate, the hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Johnson), and some Tory local authorities.
	The schoolboy trivia of the opening speech by the hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield and his refusal, six times, to answer the questions about the Conservatives' policy on the construction of new social housing units said it all. But we were then treated to the unedifying spectacle of the only three Tory Members who turned up suggesting that sorting out voids and speeding up re-letting were the answers. Those matters need to be taken in hand, but it is ludicrous to suggest that they constitute a housing policy. The nadir was reached with a speech about how the Bill would put allotments and village commons at risk. If that is what we can expect in Committee, we have a rather unedifying few weeks ahead of us.

John McDonnell: I welcome the Bill, not for its contents, but for the opportunity it gives us to explain the housing crisis that many Members' constituencies face. If what I have to say becomes repetitive, I beg no forgiveness for that, as the seriousness of the problems we face bear repetition.
	My weekly surgeries are similar to those of virtually every other London Member—and, from what I have heard, similar to those held by Members from across the country as well. At least half of my surgery cases are to do with housing, and I could weep at the circumstances that people come to me about. Families are living in temporary accommodation often for up to a decade. They are churned around every 12 to 18 months, or the maximum of two years, living in temporary accommodation with licences or in lets that last no longer. They live in appalling, overcrowded conditions, the like of which in my area might not have been seen since the end of the second world war.
	In my community, no council housing has been built, perhaps over the entire past two decades. Social landlords—housing associations—have come in, and there are some good ones in my constituency which I have tried to work with, but I must say that some of them are as unresponsive as any bureaucracy or private landlord.
	Only an extremely limited amount of social housing has been built, so my constituents live in appalling conditions. We have seen the return of Rachmanite landlords who buy property after property. They milk the housing benefit system, and they plough nothing back into those properties. I fear for the health and safety of my constituents who live in such accommodation. At best, their children settle in appalling and overcrowded conditions, but as the churning continues, they move from school to school, which affects their education and their social life. Over the past couple of weeks in my constituency we have been exposing that private landlords—the buy-to-let exploiters of the poorest within our society—are now housing people in outbuildings and sheds. That is how bad things have got in my constituency.
	In my area, we went through a process whereby after three ballots—because, obviously, the tenants did not vote the correct way the first two times—an arm's length management organisation was established. During that balloting process, tens of thousands of pounds were spent on consultants, who came along to meetings. Many of my constituents have never eaten so well as they did at those various meetings held to persuade them that this was the way forward for them.
	But the blackmail was there: people either voted for the ALMO, or they did not have their home improved. Eventually, they succumbed and transferred to the ALMO. I am extremely concerned about its management. We have had a number of examples of poor workmanship during the implementation of the decent homes programme in my area. I know of cases in which tenants have been injured as a result of the work that has gone on, following the resources that have been ploughed into the ALMO for the decent homes programme.
	With the end of the council house building programme and with insufficient social housing being brought forward, we have a homelessness problem of the sort that I have never seen in the 30 years I have lived in the area. I was elected in 1997 and we had 40,000 homeless families in London. We now have twice that number. In my borough, between 1,600 and 2,000 families are homeless and desperately in need of accommodation. The explanation is quite straightforward: we are simply not building homes anymore. To be frank, in my area, the amount of accommodation that has been built as a result of planning agreements is relatively trivial in comparison with what we need. The Bill goes nowhere near tackling the problems in my area.
	First, I find it offensive that there is empty accommodation in my area when people are living in such appalling conditions—some of them sleeping on the streets. I would like, if necessary, to look at the emergency measure of compulsorily purchasing private accommodation that has been left empty. Let us commandeer some of that accommodation, because we face a crisis on a scale that we have not seen since the second world war.
	Secondly, we should end the tax regime that encourages people to purchase buy-to-let accommodation, which forces families in my constituency to live in these conditions. If there is to be private landlordism, we should regulate it properly. In my constituency, even houses in multiple occupation are not properly inspected because the local authority does not have the resources. We have had fires and there has been a high level of risk to families. If we do not ensure that there is proper inspection and enforcement, we will risk more tragedies.
	At the end of the day, the solution is straightforward. It is not a new invention: it is called the council house. We need an emergency programme of building of the kind we have not seen for perhaps a generation. I do not see that happening as a result of the Bill. As my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Selly Oak (Lynne Jones) said, the projected numbers for social housing and council housing in particular are trivial in comparison with the need. Introducing a means-test approach will break down what little we have left when it comes to communities that live together as equally as they can.
	Not to allow councils access to the funding that they need to launch the programme is disgraceful and misguided. It is something that is lacking in the Bill. I do not understand why we are offering private companies, instead of local authorities, the opportunity to access public money. I thought that it was in the old days that people believed, "Private sector, good; public sector, bad." I thought that we were going to get a level playing field as a result of the Labour party conference decisions and some of the commitments that were given by the Prime Minister when he took over the leadership of the Labour party.
	I will look at the Bill, but I will encourage a number of my colleagues to think about the amendments that we can bring forward to tackle the Rachmanite landlords of the buy-to-let regimes, and to enable local authorities to build council houses again and have access to resources in the same way as housing associations have access to them. We need to look at other emergency measures. It does not give me any pleasure to say this, but we have had 10 years of a Labour Government. It should not be like this after 10 years of a Labour Government. We have let down a generation of children, who, in my constituency, are living in quite dreadful conditions.

Alistair Burt: I thank the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), who has finally put us in a position to wind up the debate after six hours.
	None of us comes to the issue with clean hands. We have listened to stories from colleagues on both sides of the House, and we have heard about what they see in their surgeries. We Opposition Members are no different from Labour Members. That people face the housing conditions that they do in this country today should be a matter of disappointment and sadness to all of us. That is why we are offering a reasoned amendment to the Bill. I will come to that in more detail later.
	It has been a good debate, and perhaps it had a better edge than it might have done because the Opposition had the temerity to question the policy proposed by a Government who, judging by many of the speeches that we have heard tonight, have comprehensively failed in their duties on housing and regeneration. I will tackle that point head-on in due course. Neither we nor the country are willing to be taken in any longer by a Government who wish us to believe that, just because they talk about better housing and more regeneration, it means that they will deliver it.
	I welcome the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr. Wright) to his place. He has made an excellent start to his role by offering some changes for coastal towns. The cross-departmental working that he has announced or intends to announce will be of considerable benefit to those towns, a number of which have some of the housing problems familiar to those who have spoken in the debate. I look forward to the hon. Gentleman's winding-up speech.
	I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps) for his robust attack on the Government and the failings of their policy, which became clear during the debate. He was prepared to challenge some of the myths of Labour competence in an area that they consider to be theirs. He was right to do so, and I look forward to many more speeches from him on Second Reading, but few from the Opposition Benches and more from the Government Benches in due course.

Alistair Burt: Let me deal with targets up front. Conservatives without targets built more houses than Labour with targets. Labour set targets, in respect of which it continues to disappoint. There is no evidence that targets deliver. They have been the fig leaf which Labour Members have used today to cover their embarrassment at their failure. I know what my constituents who are looking for houses would like. They would like the houses that would be built under a Conservative Government and they would like a stamp duty policy that would help them get some of them. That is it for the discussion of targets.
	Under Labour— [interruption.] The hon. Member for Luton, South (Margaret Moran) should listen. Her speech of denial was a classic of its kind. Under Labour, as she was reminded, an average of 145,290 homes a year have been built. In the last 10 years of the previous Conservative Government, the average was 164,000 a year. Across the whole period of the Governments of Mrs. Thatcher and John Major, the average was 173,000 a year. As my hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield said in his speech, people do not live in targets; they live in houses. If targets are of no consequence to Labour because it cannot meet them, what is the point? I would rather we went back to a more sensible approach. My hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs. Miller) defined a target as what those in her local community believed to be the right number for them. They had one, they built to it and it was right. The Government came along and imposed something on top which cannot be delivered. That is why it is nonsensical for Labour to advocate targets.
	The Minister for Housing was generous in taking interventions during her contribution and made a robust defence of her policy. I appreciate what she said, although her defence of policy which is failing was admirable but wrong.
	The hon. Member for Chesterfield (Paul Holmes) made two key points. He took on the central argument about why houses were not being built, and explained that it was a problem of the centre trying to take more and more powers and of no incentives for local authorities to build houses. He is right. He also noted that the attempt in the Bill to give councils the chance to build more houses was a chimera, because the money will not be made available. The hon. Gentleman spoiled it all at the end. Having described his objection to Government policy, he explained why he would not support our amendment, which was a shame.
	Let us get to the heart of the argument. We intend to work through the Committee and hope that we can produce a better Bill by the end of it. At the end of that process we will make a judgment as to how we will vote on Third Reading. At this stage, as our reasoned amendment makes clear, we believe that the evidence of delivery under the Government's fixation with control and top-down, unaccountable regional bodies is not good enough. It does not deliver the housing that all our constituents want, and virtually every Member seems to agree with that. The new merged agency will not deliver on its own, and the new social regulator will not deliver on its own. Those bodies will be assisted by the acquisition of new powers. That will give them greater powers at the expense of local decision making by democratic bodies, which is an answer that so many hon. Members have missed or simply swept aside.
	The hon. Member for Milton Keynes, South-West (Dr. Starkey) was angry and testy, but she made some good points. She mentioned the targets in her area and said that she does not think that they can be met. In all fairness, if she does not think that they can be met, what is the point? She also said that she has read the Bill carefully and wants to make sure that it includes a duty for the new agency to consult on planning, because she fears that it might be too aggressive in its controls.
	The right hon. Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr. Raynsford) spoke with the knowledge gained from his previous experience and made a number of suggestions for when the Bill is in Committee.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) made an excellent speech with the benefit of his long experience. He discussed amending the Bill to introduce a national mobility scheme, which makes a great deal of sense. He also discussed the danger of the new agency acquiring too many powers, in which he was not alone. In a number of interventions on his colleagues, the hon. Member for North-West Leicestershire (David Taylor) drew attention to what he sees as the agency taking more powers away from councils, and he is right about that.
	The  Local Government Chronicle headline for 22 November stated "Planning grab fears. Housing quango may silence councils on new towns". That headline could have been written by my hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield—that is his sort of language. The editorial stated:
	"Clearly, the government's housing targets are too precious to leave solely to local government. Housing Minister Iain Wright"—
	who is on the Government Front Bench—
	"is explicit on our front page this week, when he says that the agency is there to 'challenge' authorities that drag their heels over housing quotas. While this is an attempt to mitigate some of the NIMBYism that blights housing supply, it also takes some of the local out of local government. One of the crucial components of councils' ability to 'place-shape' is planning, and if they can be steamrollered over where housing and eco-towns are located, their role as local community leaders is significantly undermined.
	We need urgent clarifications on just how these planning powers will be used, or else we could find the Bill takes us two steps forward, one big leap back."

Lynne Jones: The hon. Gentleman talks about "aspiring" to home ownership as if it is somehow a more worthy thing to be a homeowner than a tenant.

Alistair Burt: No, because of the shortage of time. I am opening up the debate about the relative places of renting and owner-occupation in our society. I would have thought that Labour Members would find that helpful; that was the reason for doing it.
	My hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans (Anne Main) correctly expressed her concern about the powers of the new agency and raised, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke, the issue of infrastructure. We heard little from Labour Members about the need to get the infrastructure in place before the building occurs. Many of them complained about the numbers of houses not built, as do the Government, without thinking through why there is such resistance in some local communities to the housing numbers that are set. That is because communities do not feel that they have the resources to service the houses that they have been asked to take. The Government place no emphasis on dealing with that infrastructure problem or offering incentives; that is why the great monolith rolls on.
	Recent reports on how the Government have handled their policy all say the same thing: they are not doing very well. I could quote extensively from the two recent reports on pathfinders and the Thames Gateway, but to put it in a nutshell they are, as the Minister for Housing knows very well, highly critical— [ Interruption. ] Oh, all right, they are not highly critical. Let me kick off with the first conclusion of the Public Accounts Committee on the Thames Gateway:
	"The Department's management of the programme has been weak, and has not demonstrably added value to the programme."
	The report on pathfinders said:
	"there is no guarantee that intervening in the housing market in this way will address the causes rather than the symptoms of the problems experienced in these neighbourhoods"—
	not much return on £2.2 billion in five years.
	With the best interpretation in the world, those reports are pretty critical. They point to the Government's approach, not necessarily their intention or desires. The hon. Member for Luton, South spoke of good intent, and she is right, but the delivery has not been as good as it should be. As the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington said, that has been a disappointment and a let-down to all the people who thought that 10 years of a Labour Government might deliver a bit more than good intent.

Iain Wright: I thank the hon. Member for North-East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) for the kind words at the beginning of his speech. He is a decent and honourable man, fine in his moderate terms—in contrast with the rest of his Front Bench team.
	The Housing and Regeneration Bill is wide-ranging and ambitious, yet detailed and technical, and today's debate has reflected that. It is a huge Bill of 280 clauses and 10 schedules, and hon. and right hon. Members have stepped up to the plate today to express their views—often very different views. We have had 25 speeches and a great number of interventions. I would like to thank my 16 hon. and right hon. Friends for standing up firmly for their constituencies and their principles. I was going to pay tribute to hon. Members from all parties, but with the greatest respect to the three Conservative Back Benchers who actually bothered to make a speech, I have to say that the length and quality of this fine debate has been largely down to Labour Members.
	To be frank, I was expecting a bit of a cut-and-thrust debate. I was expecting people to say, "I don't think we need houses in my back yard. We don't have the infrastructure." But Conservative Members did not even bother turning up to the game. For most of the afternoon, there was no one on the Tory Back Benches at all, and I hope that their constituents recognise that.
	I turn to the opening remarks by the hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps). I found his contribution quite astonishing, but not in a positive way. He criticised the creation of an independent, stand-alone regulator for social housing tenants. He hinted that he and his party would actually abolish Oftenant. I am sure that the millions of people in social housing who deserve higher standards in core housing services would be surprised at that. Oftenant will be a modern, effective and responsive regulator, cutting red tape for good landlords whose tenants are satisfied, but intervening and securing improvements elsewhere—even bringing about changes in management—with new powers to issue enforcement notices and penalties. My hon. Friends, especially my hon. Friends the Members for Luton, South (Margaret Moran), for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne), for West Ham (Lyn Brown), for Milton Keynes, South-West (Dr. Starkey), for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn) and for Islington, South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich (Mr. Raynsford), recognised all that, but the hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield did not even know that the sector is already regulated by the Housing Corporation. That shows the extent of his concern for the services provided for tenants.
	I thank my hon. Friends, especially my hon. Friends the Members for Islington, South and Finsbury and for West Ham, for raising the point about the new regulator providing redress for constituents who have had problems with their RSL. Our proposals respond directly to tenants' concerns that they are not listened to about the issues that matter to them—a good basic housing service and having their complaints acted upon. Getting that right is a big challenge for housing providers. We intend the regulator to focus on working with providers to achieve a good management service and be responsive to tenants. When complaints are supported by clear evidence and highlight wide systemic failures by the landlords, affecting many tenants, it is for the regulator to investigate.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East (Mr. Purchase), in a passionate speech, cited not clause 4, but clause 173, on the provision of social housing. He mentioned his fear that it was the start of means-testing. My right hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, West and Royton (Mr. Meacher) and my hon. Friend the Member for Great Grimsby (Mr. Mitchell) also mentioned means-testing. Let me clarify the matter: the Bill does not introduce a means test. It does not mean that social homes whose tenants can afford the mark-up will cease to be social homes. Anything that is social housing now will remain social housing, even if it does not meet the definition. The Bill does not change protections in contracts for existing tenants or change policy for new ones.

Iain Wright: I apologise, but I have not got much time, so I shall not give way.
	My hon. Friends the Members for Islington, North, for Islington, South and Finsbury, for Denton and Reddish, for Luton, South, for Ealing, Acton and Shepherd's Bush (Mr. Slaughter) and for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) brought home to the House their experiences in their advice surgeries. They made important and emotional contributions to the debate. They confirmed what I experience in my constituency surgery: the biggest issue that affects hon. Members—certainly Labour Members—is the provision of affordable and social housing and the need to tackle overcrowding. They re-emphasised the key point that we need more homes. We have already said that the overcrowding standards are out of date and need to be changed.
	However, it is not enough simply to change the definition. We need to build more and larger homes and we are already investing £35 million in pilots in London to help those who want to move out of large properties into smaller ones to help relieve overcrowding. Further work is needed and I hope that we can explore that in Committee.
	Another major theme of the debate has been councils' ability to build new homes. Let me make it clear: there has been nothing to stop councils building homes, but there have been disincentives. For example, no provision is made in the housing revenue account subsidy allowance for financing the capital costs of new council housing. Operating surpluses from any new homes after allowances are made for management, maintenance and major repairs are redistributed nationally in the HRA subsidy system. That means that, on average, 25 per cent. of the rental income from any new home built by a council is redistributed nationally in that way. So what we will do is use the new powers in the Bill to exempt new supply from the HRA subsidy system. That will allow councils to keep the rental operating surpluses from those homes, which are currently redistributed nationally. We want councils to come forward and build more homes. We have set challenging targets for building more new social homes. Councils have an important role to play in meeting those challenges. We want to enable them to build more new social housing where this offers value for money.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North made a fantastic point about the governance and accountability of ALMOs. Let me point out to him that the local authority still retains ultimate responsibility for the functions that it asks the ALMO to carry out as its agent. Ultimately, local authorities must manage their ALMO contracts, and although ALMOs are at arm's length, they are still part of the body, so it is important that there is local accountability and democratic engagement.
	My right hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich and the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) both brought skills and expertise as former Housing Ministers and made detailed, important speeches. Both mentioned the importance of tenants. I hope that they will therefore both welcome the provisions in the Bill that will place a stronger requirement on local authorities to co-operate with tenants who want to explore a change of ownership of their homes. They will mean that a local authority will not be able unnecessarily to block a transfer where tenants wish to explore that and have developed a robust case for it, and where it does not hinder the local authority's ability to deliver a satisfactory landlord service.
	Let me come to a major part of the Bill, the establishment of the Homes and Communities Agency. The hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield failed to welcome the new agency. He saw its creation in a simplistic way, as abolishing one organisation and creating another. He should recognise, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes, South-West (Dr. Starkey) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Greenwich and Woolwich among others, that although the current system provides some progress, it shows a degree of fragmentation and complexity, with funding streams delivered in silos, overlapping remits and objectives, and—this relates to the point about the system being top-down—the over-involvement of central Departments in delivery, which limits capacity. The hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield should know that the agency's true strength will come from adopting a holistic approach, bringing together the land, investment and skills required to facilitate the building of more homes.
	A number of hon. Members correctly mentioned the relationship between the Homes and Communities Agency and local authorities, which is key. This relationship will be crucial in delivering new homes. Far from being a top-down organisation, the agency will help local authorities, by suggesting, by challenging and yes, by funding, in order to increase councils' capacities. It can second staff or provide the infrastructure necessary to build homes.

Iain Wright: The Bill already requires the agency to act as a partner to local authorities for development of the local area agreement and local improvement targets. That means that the agency must have regard to the local improvement targets set out in the LAA when carrying out its housing and regeneration activities.
	The hon. Member for Basingstoke (Mrs. Miller) made a thoughtful speech, in which she mentioned the agency's powers in respect of planning. She asked for clarity and for me to reassure her, which is what I hope I shall be able to do. The Secretary of State already has powers in that respect, which are not new powers. There are powers to designate areas under the Leasehold Reform, Housing and Urban Development Act 1993. The Bill will transfer those powers to the new agency and make their operation clearer. To meet today's housing challenge we need a range of powers at our disposal. Designating an area and conferring local planning authority functions on the HCA will allow it to act where, for example, a major regeneration project or eco-town is at risk. The HCA would be subject to the normal planning system, as any other planning authority is. We do not anticipate using the powers frequently and we are strongly committed to working with and supporting local authorities.
	On a similar theme, the hon. Member for St. Albans (Anne Main) mentioned her concern about the HCA's compulsory purchase powers. Those powers are not new and, as now, will be subject to the agreement of the Secretary of State. CPO powers will be important to the new agency in trying to unlock sites, especially for regeneration, in cases where the owner is unknown or where there are areas of high fragmentation of ownership. An example that was mentioned is the Olympics site. The agency's compulsory purchase powers will also provide certainty to its delivery partners that the comprehensive redevelopment projects will happen.
	The hon. Member for Welwyn Hatfield did not mention the environment once in his speech. He did not welcome the inclusion in the Bill of powers to allow us to make it mandatory for buyers of new homes to be given information through the code on the sustainability of their homes. Twenty-seven per cent. of all carbon emissions in the UK come from domestic buildings. The code aims to encourage developers to build more sustainable, low-carbon homes. A typical flat built to code standard will reduce carbon emissions by 450 kg a year for level 3. That is the equivalent of 1,500 miles travelled by an average car in Britain. For level 6, there would be a reduction of 1,500 kg a year, the equivalent of 5,000 miles.
	The hon. Gentleman did not mention the environment, but my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes, South-West certainly did. She described with great skill the difficulties that young families in her constituency face in getting on to the housing ladder. She also set out the need to increase the supply of all types of housing—owner-occupied, shared ownership and social rented. She is right. I now chair the Milton Keynes and South Midlands inter-regional board, and the ambition of that area to have more houses has been made very clear to me, both here and at meetings of the board. My hon. Friend mentioned the Milton Keynes tariff. That has shown that these arrangements can work; it is a real example of how we can get better results from having the public and private sectors working together with English Partnerships to provide expertise to local councils and facilitating agreement over so-called super section 106 agreements.
	There are many more things that I should like to mention, but time does not allow me to do so. I should, however, like to pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff, North (Julie Morgan). She welcomed the fact that the Bill will provide the same security of tenure under the rights and responsibilities of Gypsies and Travellers, and so do I.
	Given the scale of the housing challenge, I would have liked to see a degree of political consensus on the Bill. Unfortunately, in the few contributions made by Conservative Members, that was not forthcoming. The Minister for Housing, my right hon. Friend the Member for Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), made an excellent contribution in opening the debate. In it, she challenged Conservative Members to come with us and to work together to address the housing supply problem, to help to improve opportunity and ambition and to reduce the ability of housing to be a source of inequality. She asked three direct questions of the Conservatives. She asked how many homes they thought were needed, if they did not agree with the target of 3 million homes. There was no response. She asked whether they would pledge to back the £8 billion that we have committed, or whether they would cut it. There was no response. She also asked whether they would support the Bill. It is clear that they will not.
	The dividing lines are clear. The Conservatives have shown their narrow-mindedness and their parochialism. They want to pull up the drawbridges of their castles and country homes—in some cases, quite literally—and to limit the opportunity for millions of people to get a decent house. Their lack of ideas, their negativity, their "I'm all right, Jack" attitude and their absence from the Chamber today will do nothing to satisfy the housing needs of hard-working families and older people.

Patrick McLoughlin: On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Perhaps you might inform Labour Members that the rules on Divisions have been changed. A Division called after 10 o'clock on such a motion is deferred, so they need not go into the Lobbies.

Desmond Swayne: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As I was saying, I share the Lymington river with my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, East. It forms the dividing line between our two parliamentary divisions, and we have both received an enormous correspondence—and amount of lobbying—about the issues that I wish to raise this evening. My hon. Friend has apologised to me for not being able to be in his place this evening, but he had already entered into a commitment when I learned, at 12.30 pm on Thursday, that I had secured this debate. I believe that, even as we speak, he is at sea with the Royal Navy.
	The port of Lymington makes a contribution to my local economy that is not far short of £100 million a year. The harbour exists only because it is protected from the waves of the western Solent by Lymington's salt marsh and mud flats, but the problem is that they have been eroding since 1920. I understand that New Forest district council's coastal protection team estimates that the current rate of erosion is between 2 yd and 6 yd a year at the periphery, and 1 yd a year on average in the harbour itself. At that rate, the salt marshes will cease to exist by some date between 2030 and 2040. That will mean that the vast majority of existing moorings in the harbour will become unviable, which will be an economic disaster for Lymington.
	The Lymington harbour commission has been working on the problem since the early 1990s. Over the past two and a half years, in association with the consultants Black & Veatch, it has come up with a scheme that is both viable and affordable. I stress the word "affordable", as we are not asking for Government money—indeed, to do so in an Adjournment debate would be out of order.
	The plan is to build a series of overlapping breakwaters over the next 25 years, with work starting next year, if permission is obtained. The breakwaters will do exactly what the salt marshes do now. They will protect the harbour from the waves of the western Solent but, crucially, they will also protect the surviving salt marsh that they enclose. Let us be clear: if we do nothing, we will lose not only the harbour but the salt marsh.
	The salt marshes fall within the Southampton Water special protection area and are a very important wildlife site, especially for overwintering and breeding birds. The area also falls within the Solent special area of conservation, which is protected by the habitats directive, and it is, indeed, a European Natura 2000 site.
	Notwithstanding the permitted development rights of the Lymington harbour commissioners under the Pier and Harbour Order (Lymington) Confirmation Act 1951, the proposed breakwaters will require planning permission from the New Forest national park authority. To that end, an environmental assessment has been made and I understand that the statutory consultees will sit down and scrutinise the draft assessment on 5 December. However, I think I am correct in saying that, whoever the statutory consultees are, they will be led by Natural England, which has a national policy of not interfering to secure coastal protection where deterioration is the result of a natural process.
	The breakwater's footprints will be on the existing salt marsh, and I understand it is likely that Natural England will judge that an adverse effect. It will not take into account the fact that, although the salt marsh footprint will be given up to the breakwater, a larger amount of the salt marsh that will otherwise disappear will be saved by the breakwaters. The salt marsh land occupied by the breakwaters will cease to exist anyway as a consequence of the continuing erosion.
	If the Lymington harbour commissioners cannot get Natural England to acquiesce to their proposition, and if Natural England persists in saying it will be an adverse development for the salt marsh, the commissioners' only recourse will be to make a case to the Secretary of State on the basis of overwhelming public interest. If the Secretary of State accepts the case, the commissioners will have to enter into an arrangement with Natural England to compensate the organisation for loss of the salt marsh by paying for the creation and stewardship of an equal amount of salt marsh elsewhere in the kingdom.
	It is into that Alice in Wonderland world that I want the Minister to intrude. It is absurd to ask the Lymington harbour commissioners to pay for the creation of 5 acres of salt marsh elsewhere because they are taking action to save 12 acres of salt marsh in Lymington. I accept that 5 acres occupied by the breakwaters will be given up, but that land would be lost anyway. If we do nothing we shall lose all the salt marsh and the harbour, too.
	I hope that the Minister will be able to provide some reassurance to the large number of organisations and people in Lymington who are rightly concerned about these developments. Those supporting the Lymington harbour commission include the harbour advisory group, the sailing clubs, the marinas, the chamber of commerce, New Forest district council, Wightlink and the hundreds of constituents who have written to my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, East.
	The second issue I ask the Minister to deal with is the plan by Wightlink significantly to increase the size of the ferries that operate between Lymington and Yarmouth, which is in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Mr. Turner)—I am glad that he is in the Chamber tonight. A few weeks ago, I attended a public meeting about the plans in Lymington. The meeting was highly charged; it was packed—more than 300 people attended—and a number of questions were asked, which might have been answered by Natural England had it taken the trouble to send someone to the meeting. On 2 November, I wrote to Natural England asking why it had not taken that opportunity but I have not yet had a reply.
	Had I been granted a whole parliamentary day to examine the issue, we should still not have covered it all, as I discovered at the meeting. If the Minister will forgive me, I shall briefly summarise the issues as I see them. There are three competing interests. The first is the environmental interest. There are those who insist that the significantly increased ferry size will generate a bow wave—a wash—such that it will accelerate the erosion of the salt marshes. Equally, there are those who argue, on the basis of tests carried out in tanks in Zurich, that new modern ferries will generate a reduced wash, although the counter-argument is that those tests were carried out in relatively deep water and the port of Lymington is relatively shallow. What is more, when countering a side wind, the directional thrust of the engine type that is unique to Wightlink's operations will have a deleterious effect on the sides of the channel.
	The second interest is the commercial one: the need of enterprise and jobs in Lymington for an efficient ferry service to the Isle of Wight. That has to be set against the commercial interests of the trade generated by the huge number of leisure craft that operate from the port of Lymington. It is the case, however, that the current ferry service is uneconomic; it will lose money unless investment is put into new ferries that are cost-effective, modern and meet contemporary regulations and standards.
	The third interest is the interest of the other river users, principally the yachtsmen, the sailing clubs and the marinas. There is an argument that the new greatly increased size of ferry will inconvenience them or put them in significant danger. When I refer to the size of the new ferries, I do not just mean the relatively modest increase in capacity; I am also referring to the greatly increased displacement of water, the increased deadweight and the increased thrust. The argument is that all sorts of activities that now take place in the Lymington river will not be able to continue, particularly the free sailing training that is afforded by the sailing clubs to youngsters, many of whom are from less advantaged backgrounds.
	All of this has resulted in an enormous row. I have no doubt that assessments, modelling and sea trials might provide some of the answers to the disputed questions, but I do not believe that that will solve the dispute itself, because the reality is that these ferries are already half-built and many people in Lymington feel that, whatever the outcome, they are being presented with a fait accompli.
	Into this mêlée steps the Lymington harbour commission, of which I have spoken. It insists that because Lymington is designated as an open port it has no ability to deny the ferries access. Indeed, it cannot deny anyone access; I am told that even a supertanker can have access to the Lymington river and all the Lymington harbour commissioners can do is impose measures to mitigate the impact. Measures to mitigate the impact might well affect other river users as well. Even if such mitigation is imposed directly on Wightlink—in the form of a slower speed limit, for instance—that will affect other river users, because it will mean that ferries will occupy the river channel for longer in any hour, to their disadvantage.
	The following is the essential point I wish to make to the Minister. If an undertaking of this size and sort had taken place on land there would have been a planning application and all the objections and interests would have properly been taken into account in the determination of it, but because this is happening at sea apparently no one needs any permission to apply for anything, notwithstanding all the designations—I have spoken of Natura 2000. I believe this is an enormous omission in our planning system, on which Ministers should reflect and act. A Planning Bill has been published today, and an appropriate amendment to it might prevent these situations from arising in future—but that would not, of course, be retrospective.
	There will, however, be a planning application. Indeed, there is one because of the effects on land. In order to accommodate the new ferries, there has to be some shore works at Lymington, and a planning application has been put in. According to the Minister for the South East, in response to a written question of mine of 14 November—column 243—this planning application will be determined by the Marine and Fisheries Agency, and it will consider the opinion of Natural England that Wightlink's proposals constitute a plan or project for the purposes of the Conservation (Natural Habitats, &c) Regulations 1994, and therefore an appropriate assessment will be required.
	Wightlink will argue that the proposals do not constitute a plan or a project. So the conservationists and the yachtsmen of Lymington are, in effect, looking for the Marine and Fisheries Agency to act as the seventh cavalry and come down on the side of Natural England and its assessment of what is a plan or a project. Equally, it might all end up being settled by a judge in court, at great expense to everyone. I want to know from the Minister whether there is any other statutory body that is in a position to demand an appropriate assessment before the matter is determined and the shore works take place.
	I accept that this process of dealing with the issue is better than none, but it falls far short of a proper planning inquiry, because the appropriate assessment will take into account only the environmental interests. It will take no account of the commercial interests, or, most important, the leisure craft interests. The sailors of Lymington have the most to lose, but their voice is not going to be heard—and it ought to be.

Joan Ruddock: I congratulate the hon. Member for New Forest, West (Mr. Swayne) on obtaining this debate, which is obviously on an important subject. He has made his case enthusiastically. I regret that I may have to confirm a lot of the things that he has already said, but I need to do that for the record.
	The hon. Gentleman asks how the salt marshes and Lymington harbour itself can be protected from the open seas. As he has stated, this is an important site. The salt marshes and mudflats at Lymington estuary are internationally designated as part of the Solent and Southampton water special protection area for birds. They constitute a Ramsar site, and are part of the Solent maritime special area of conservation. They are also part of the national sites of special scientific interest series.
	Natural England has confirmed that recent studies have estimated that the Solent will lose around 700 hectares of salt marsh over the next 100 years due to sea level rises and increased erosion, and that there will also be losses of inter-tidal mud and sand. The coast is able to adapt to sea level rises, as it has over the centuries, by rolling back. Much of the Solent is developed and not available for such dynamic change. However, there are sites where such adaptation can occur and this is the only way that salt marshes can be part of the Solent's suite of habitats into the future. It is not—I repeat, not— sustainable to maintain salt marshes in situ in the long term.
	Natural England is working through the shoreline management plan process to enable important habitats to roll back where appropriate. There is limited scope in Lymington for such a roll-back. A water level management plan led by the Environment Agency is exploring the possibility of allowing salt marsh to form up-river from the harbour, where it will naturally migrate under climate change.
	However, I can see the logic of the hon. Gentleman's argument that, if the salt marsh habitat in the Lymington river will ultimately disappear through the effects of sea level rises, a temporary artificial intervention to protect at least part of this asset in the short term should be welcomed. The merits of that approach, however, need to be very carefully assessed and weighed against the potential loss, in so doing, of some of that habitat. In particular, it is necessary to undertake sophisticated modelling to ensure that, as far as possible, any proposal would not have unforeseen effects that could exacerbate the loss of the salt marsh.
	Regarding the proposed breakwater development in Lymington harbour, as the hon. Gentleman knows, this lies within the New Forest national park and consequently the New Forest national park authority is the appropriate local planning authority. However, I understand that Lymington harbour commissioners are relying on permitted development rights—a general development order under section 25 of the Pier and Harbour Order (Lymington) Confirmation Act 1951—to pursue the development. As such, the new breakwaters do not require planning permission from the New Forest national park authority. However, as the proposal affects an international site, the national park's approval will still be required under regulation 62 of the Conservation (Natural Habitats, etc.) Regulations 1994.
	The regulations say that where a developer relies on a general development order, the developer still has to make an application in writing to the local planning authority for its approval. The regulations state that
	"the local planning authority shall, taking account of any representations made by the appropriate nature conservation body, make an appropriate assessment of the implications of the development for the European site in view of that site's conservation objectives."
	As the hon. Gentleman said, the New Forest national park authority is awaiting the production by Black & Veatch—consultants working on behalf of the Lymington harbour commissioners—of a draft environmental statement to support an environmental impact assessment and an appropriate assessment. I understand that Natural England has provided some informal feedback on the drafting of the statement and impact assessment in meetings with the harbour commissioners, and Natural England intends to respond formally in writing to the commissioners next month. As yet, no application for consent to the breakwater proposal has been submitted to the Marine and Fisheries Agency. Assuming that an application is made in due course, it will need to be supported by an environmental statement incorporating a draft appropriate assessment. In considering any such application, the MFA will consult formally with Natural England. Despite what the hon. Gentleman said, Natural England has no pre-formed view on the issue.
	As the hon. Gentleman said, a meeting for Black & Veatch, Natural England, the national park authority and the MFA is scheduled for 5 December, at which the results of that work will be heard. Until the regulators have seen the report, it would be inappropriate for them to take a formal position on the proposal. Clearly, they could not have gone to the meeting that has been described. As members of a statutory body, the Lymington harbour commissioners have a duty under section 62 of the Environment Act 1995 to take into account the impact of their decisions on the national park. The national park authority considers the coastal landscape outside Lymington harbour to be of very high importance because of its unspoilt natural beauty. The area is highly sensitive and could be irreversibly damaged by inappropriate or unsympathetic development, so there is a responsibility on the harbour commissioners to ensure that the highest possible standards of design, and the best materials, are applied in the construction of the breakwaters to protect the special qualities of the national park.
	The national park authority recognises the significance of the national conservation interest and the level of legal protection it is afforded, but it is also aware of the socio-economic importance of Lymington harbour, and it is therefore keen to ensure a balanced, sustainable solution to the problems facing the port. The harbour needs a solution that takes into account nature conservation and landscape and environmental issues, while securing the future of the recreational and commercial activities that sustain the local economy and enrich the life of local communities and visitors. The national park authority is keen to support a sustainable solution that meets the range of legitimate demands made on the part of the New Forest concerned.
	The hon. Gentleman pointed out that it is possible for the Secretary of State to consider an application for
	"imperative reasons of overriding public interest",
	and he seeks an assurance on the issue. I am sorry to disappoint him, but it is obvious that until the results of the appropriate assessment are available I can comment no further on that point.
	The hon. Gentleman is correct that the Wightlink application has been received by the Marine Fisheries Agency. Wightlink applied for a licence under the Food and Environment Protection Act 1985, and for consent under the Coast Protection Act 1949 for works to improve the ferry berth and access ramps in Lymington. In considering such applications the MFA endeavours to satisfy legitimate development aspirations and to promote economic growth, commensurate with delivering sustainable development. I can assure the hon. Gentleman that all applications for marine works are subject to rigorous scientific evaluation to prevent or minimise any adverse environmental effects and prevent undue interference for other users of the sea.
	In dealing with the application the MFA has consulted a range of marine stakeholders and other regulators, including Natural England, which has a statutory duty to advise on nature conservation issues. In considering whether to grant consent, NE has advised that the MFA should also have regard to the potential impact of Wightlink's intention to replace the current ferries with larger and more powerful vessels. In its view a formal appropriate assessment should be carried out. Natural England also suggested that the scheme may be a relevant project under the Marine Works (Environmental Impact Assessment) Regulations 2007. Wightlink, as the hon. Gentleman said, has challenged NE's stance with its own legal advice.
	The MFA has not yet taken a view on these matters but will have full regard to the responses that it has received, together with the expert advice of the Department's marine scientists. Although the proposed vessels are understood to have a significantly larger superstructure and correspondingly greater displacement, more information about their propulsion, operational speed and service frequency will be needed to assess better any risks. The Lymington harbour commissioners manage the Lymington river and harbour in accordance with the Lymington Harbour Orders of 1951 to 2002. Although they have indicated that the construction works will have no adverse effect, it is not clear to what extent they have assessed the potential effects of operating larger ferries.
	I understand, as does the hon. Gentleman, that New Forest district council says that planning permission is required. No doubt the larger ferries may also have implications for road traffic and other planning-related matters. Accordingly, the agency intends shortly to meet Wightlink, the harbour commissioners, Natural England and New Forest district council to consider how each regulator will take forward the process of appropriate assessment. The matter needs to be sorted out between those regulators. They will need to address how the potential risks associated with the operation of larger vessels can be properly assessed and what measures may be available, if necessary, to mitigate their effect on the environment and other river users. The results of the appropriate assessments may, of course, have an impact on the time scale for the introduction of the ferries or the operating arrangements for them.
	I have done my best to obtain all the relevant information in order to assist the hon. Member for New Forest, West and his constituents. We are dealing with very complex matters in trying to conserve our beautiful places and our biodiversity while satisfying human demand for economic opportunity, trade and leisure. It is important to explore the issues and this has been an important debate. I heard what the hon. Gentleman said, and I trust that he will understand why it is not possible for me to give him more definitive answers at this juncture.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Adjourned accordingly at twelve minutes to Eleven o'clock.